End-of-summer updates – and an exhale

So ends a summer of wackiness – house guests, van-driving kids around to skateparks, and the passing of a loved one. (One summer highlight was a road trip with my dad and two sons to Utah's Zion & Bryce national parks. Here's a slideshow of our adventures. Plus two summer skate vids: 1 & 2.) Kids are now back at school and I'm finally ramping back up to a full writing schedule and catching up on some neglected career management.

On the book front, there's good news: Simon & Schuster has announced the release of a Hurricane Season paperback on Oct 1. The bad news: it's a cut-rate "print on demand" edition, which means it won't actually be in bookstores, unless all of New Orleans descends on B&N at once demanding copies. Still, it's nice the book still has legs. Or a leg.

My Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley biography is progressing, and I'm hoping for publication in 2011. Meanwhile, you can sample this strange man's life at my online gallery. Also next year I'm hoping for a new Light This Candle paperback release in May and a Driving with the Devil audio book.

On the web front, I decided to sh**-can my short-lived PenAndPencilClub.com blog and focus on improving NealThompson.com. I'll still post videos of author interviews, etc. In social networking, I've created a Facebook page for Driving with the Devil. You can 'like' it here or click on the FB box to your right. I plan to start sending out a quarterly email newsletter next month. If you need another inbox distraction, there's a signup form in the box to your right. I've also updated my Amazon author page.

In publishing… New York Times columnist Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" and Olympia author Jim Lynch's "Border Songs" (both great) have just won Washington State Book Awards. Last year I'd chatted over beers with 2010 fiction winner Jonathan Evison following the award ceremony at Seattle Public Library. I'll post that interview soon, but in the meantime here's a fun interview Evison recently did with Warren Etheredge on Warren's new cable TV show, "The High Bar." (I was also a recent "High Bar" guest, talking with Warren about NASCAR, moonshine, and Driving with the Devil – we even sipped some corn liquor together. I'll post a link once the show airs.)

Another Evison video: http://vimeo.com/9113317

And here's an Evison interview in this week's Seattle Stranger .