Your name as a character in my next book!

There's a FANTASTIC project going on at the moment called Authors for the Philippines, raising urgently needed money for hurricane relief.  You can bid on over a hundred cool things donated by authors including !  That's right.  If you're the winning bid, I will probably do something awful or terribly sad to you in my next book.  You might not even be nice, but that's just a risk you're going to have to take.  It's open internationally, but please bid in pounds.  Good luck!  And look around the site, there's amazing stuff.

In other (far more selfish news), the US publication of The Crane Wife is in January, and the countdown has been kicked off by an amazing review in Maximum Shelf.  I thought it was just going to be the interview with me that you see there, but golly.

Finally, I just want to say that I get a lot of requests through my comments section, and I just am so honoured and touched and LUCKY that people ask me stuff.  I wish I had time to answer them all, and I'm so sorry I can't, but I do read every single one (honestly, I really do).  I'm so grateful to you all, from all over the world, like Malaysia and Germany and even Utah.  Greetings to all of you, and I so hope I get to meet some of you on the road (like next week when I'm in Slovenia!).