I'm hanging out at Sia McKye's today!

Yeah, okay, I haven't posted on my own blog for *mumble, mumble* over a week, but I'm guest-posting at Sia McKye's Over Coffee, on some of the more mundane aspects of getting published. Well, maybe "mundane" is not the best choice of words (doesn't exactly encourage a reader to go have a look now, does it?), but I'm talking about some of the things you may have to do once you get that publishing contract. Stop by! Sia runs a great blog and it's always a good conversation.

Book People are Nice People! (the latest in a series...)

Pardon the double-duty post, but I had to put this in "News" as well as the blog...

I just received the most awesome blurb from author Nicole Mones. This was especially exciting for me because I loved her book, "Lost in Translation," which when it came out, I thought was one of the very few books by a Western writer that presented contemporary China in a way that I believed ("The Last Chinese Chef" is on the top of my To Read list).

I have to put up the blurb here, because it's too awesome not to share:

"Finally a Western writer has taken China’s domestically bestselling genre of wild, louche-life youth and re-imagined it as a highly original expat thriller. It’s a wild ride—but don’t turn the pages too fast. Brackmann’s evocation of China, funny, frustrating, frightening, sometimes tender, and always real, is worth savoring."

- -Nicole Mones, Lost in Translation & The Last Chinese Chef

I can't tell you how truly gratifying it is to have authors whose work I have enjoyed and whose books are on my bookshelves respond to mine with such generosity and understanding.

Jeff Abbott, T. Jefferson Parker, Eliot Pattison, Qiu Xiaolong, and now Nicole Mones, thank you so very much.

I know, I know...

I have been a Very Bad Blogger. I didn't even manage to do Friday Cat Blogging. I will! I swear!

Things are starting to heat up with Rock Paper Tiger's debut less than three months away. I'm really excited and pleased by all the activity and by the hardworking folks at Soho. I'll have more news to post on that front soon.

Otherwise, hard at work on the new book and fairly disinterested in the Oscars.