Boylan family update: Falcon, Fiction, & Freedom

Hello, you fabulous creatures.  JB here, just checking in.  I wanted to thank everybody who’s bought and read Falcon Quinn so far.  I admit to not knowing much about how children’s books are marketed and sold; all I know is that it’s a different world from memoirs and novels, where it’s all about reviews and marketing and getting yourself on a TV show and reading pithy little excerpts in bookstores from Bangor to Carson City.  As I understand things, the trick here is to win over school librarians, which I’ve indeed been trying to do.  So far, so good, but it’s slow, which is frustrating for me, since I love FALCON and am hoping he will, in time, take over the world.

Other notes from Belgrade Lakes:  I finished the most recent version of FALCON QUINN II, due out next spring or summer.  And I’ve been looking at some preliminary covers.  (The one I’m posting here is just a sketch, still; I don’t think Falcon’s face is quite right here yet.  Still: gorgeous, as Brandon Dorman’s work always is.)

Uploading Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor has left me free to work on my adult novel due to Random House by year’s end.  This is the second half of the two-book contract, the first book of which was I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU.  This has meant working on an adult novel for the first time in many years– since before SHE’S NOT THERE, actually, and I am wondering, as I write this novel, how my writing in fiction has changed after about ten years of working on memoir, and then children’s books.  It’s probably not for me to say.  But I’m guessing the voice is a little less panicked, a little darker, but a little gentler and funnier too.  Who knows?  Authors are always the last to know.

Meanwhile, the Maine summer has begun, as it always does, with fits and starts– gorgeous, perfect days one moment, rain and gloom the next.  The last week or two has found us busy closing up Zach’s sophomore year of high school and Sean’s last year of middle school.  We have been to an honors assembly (where Zach won  a prize for scholarship) and two middle school band concerts.  Tomorrow is “graduation” from 8th grade.  I could not be prouder of my sons.  Just ahead:  warm days on the lake, lobsters, summer camp, mojitos.

At this hour, that’s the way it looks from here.

(EDIT: 5 PM:  Harper’s asked me to take down the preliminary cover I’d posted of Falcon Quinn II, since it’s you know, preliminary.  Which seems like a fair request, and so instead I have posted up this disturbingly va-va-va voomish photo of me taken at the Falcon Quinn launch party two weeks ago.  A photo taken, in fact, by one AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS.  So how cool is that? Answer:  cool enough.)