I am Lazarus, come back to tell you all

My last post on this blog was June 22–June 22, for crying out loud. That’s almost two months. I didn’t INTEND to lose two months of blogging time, but the truth is that I lost two month of pretty much every kind of time, shoved onto the back burner in favor Three Big Things that I had to do first. And now I’ve done them, and I’m back.

The First Big Thing was the launch of THE HOLLOW CITY, my newest thriller from Tor, about a man with schizophrenia caught in a web of monsters, conspiracies, cultists, and murder. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve written, precisely because it was the hardest book I’ve ever written, and I’ve been delighted byt the positive response to it. People really seem to love it, which is awesome. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out. I toured with that book for three solid weeks, and it was nuts, and it broke my brain in half, and it was very hard to think of anything else, but I totally had to anyway because of:

The Second Big Thing was the major revision of FRAGMENTS, the sequel to PARTIALS, which I completed WHILE TOURING for THE HOLLOW CITY. That sentence contained A LOT OF CAPITAL LETTERS. Usually a book tour is a very hard place to get any meaningful work done; you get up in the morning, usually pretty early, pack, drive to the airport, fly to a new place, land, go to a new hotel, unpack, go to a book event, go back to the hotel, go to sleep, and in the morning you do it again. Every day for three straight weeks. I actually got to spend four days in San Diego for ComicCon, right in the middle of the tour, which gave me a nice break from the travel, but it was still crazy. Nevertheless, the revision had to be done, so I did it, and managed to finish it two days before the final drop-dead due date (I totally missed all the earlier due dates). It was hard, but you guys are going to love FRAGMENTS when it comes out next Spring. Huzzah! And then when I finished my book tour I came home and immediately left again for:

The Third Big Thing was, by far, the biggest and craziest of the big things. I packed up my family and moved to Germany. Why? Why not? People keep assuming there’s a business reason, or that we’re moving here for relatives, or something like that, but you know what? We moved because we could, and my wife is the kind of awesome person who says “yes” when I say something insane like “let’s move our family of 7 to a foreign country where we don’t speak the language, just for the hell of it.” I write full time, so I’m not tied to an office or anything like that, and I can email my editors from pretty much anywhere, so we decided to take a year and do something nuts that we might never again have the time or money to be able to do. We got here on July 26 with pretty much nothing: all the clothes we could fit in our luggage, some of the kids favorite toys, and that’s it. We had rented a house, but we didn’t have any furniture to put into it, and all seven of us slept on the floor for the first couple of nights as we started the slow process of procuring beds and couches and so on. We have most of that stuff now, which is good because most German homes don’t have carpets and sleeping on the floor was pretty crappy.

Those are my three big things. There was no room in my head for anything else. Just to really hit home how big those three things were, I had surgery in that same time frame and IT DIDN’T EVEN MAKE THE LIST. I had my tailbone removed right before I went on tour, and let me tell you how awesome it was to sit on an airplane every frakking day while still recovering from butt surgery: pretty awesome.

Last week I started writing again, back to work on my cloning book EXTREME MAKEOVER, which I love and which I hope to finish in the next three months before I have to drop everything and write the final PARTIALS book. Today, my writing urges somewhat sated, I started blogging again. I intend to blog much more often now, even more than I used to, as a sort of chronicle of my family’s adjustments to living in Germany. This is a ridiculously beautiful country. I live two blocks from a forest, their bread is even better than their sausages, and if you ask them they will put roasted lamb kebabs on a pizza. Almost everyone I’ve talked to is a board game player. Where has this culture been all my life?