Princess of Trelian in paperback!

It's paperback pub day for The Princess of Trelian! 

As always, I strongly encourage you to get a copy at your local independent bookstore, but it's also available at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon. 

If you want a signed and/or personalized copy, you should order from WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They'll let me know and I'll head over to sign a copy just for you! (If you only see the hardcover listed, just click "other editions of this title" to get to the paperback.)

If you've already read The Princess of Trelian and are waiting for book 3 ... I can tell you that the third book is now scheduled for fall of 2015. I'll post more specific details when I have them! :)

Special PRINCESS OF TRELIAN pre-order promotion!

Starting this Tuesday, for a limited time, pre-order THE PRINCESS OF TRELIAN and get a free copy of The Dragon of Trelian!

The ever-awesome WORD bookstore will give a free trade paperback edition of the first Trelian novel, The Dragon of Trelian, to the first 10 people who pre-order book 2, THE PRINCESS OF TRELIAN, starting this Tuesday, March 6! I'll post the pre-order link here and on my website late tomorrow night.

Special thanks to my also-ever-awesome publisher, Candlewick Press, for partnering with WORD for this promotion. I'm excited that 10 of you will get free copies of the first book! If you haven't already read book 1, this is your chance to get both books at once. And if you have already read the first one, this is your chance to give it to some nice friend of yours who you think will like it, too!

The Trelian sequel has, uh, another title!

Choosing a title for the sequel was so much fun, we decided to do it again! Actually, the sales folks had some good thoughts about keeping "Trelian" in the title to help make the connection clear between the two books, so we decided to tweak it a little. The new title is:

THE PRINCESS OF TRELIAN

Goes quite nicely with The Dragon of Trelian, I think, and one more "of Trelian" title for the third book would make a lovely set all together.

The Trelian sequel has a title!

And it is:

The Dragon Princess: A Novel of Trelian

Calen fans: fear not! There is still a lot of Calen in this book. This story, like the first one, is told from both his and Meg's point of view, and a LOT of things happen to both of them throughout the novel. Exciting and significant things. Some of them are VERY VERY exciting and significant. But I am not going to tell you what they are. You will have to read the book.

And when can you do that, you ask? I will tell you: Spring 2012. When we know the exact month, I will post it here. And when the cover is ready, I will post that here, as well. The story itself is written and complete, but I'm still making little changes here and there. This week I'm reviewing the copyedits and trying to decide once and for all on an important character's name that I keep changing from draft to draft.

In other news, I have other news but I am not allowed to tell you about it yet. But it is GREAT news and I am SO EXCITED!!! I will post it here as soon as I can. For now, you will just have to take my word for it. :)

OK - back to work with me. Hope you all have been having a great summer! I know I've been absent from the blogosphere for a while—crazy-busy as usual and also moved to a new apartment in a new neighborhood (hello, Greenpoint!) which left little time for anything else for a while. Insert my usual promise about blogging more often here. I will try! I will at least try to make sure I post the important things in a timely fashion.

Oh and one last thing: I now have an official Facebook page, so please stop by and "like" me to get updates on new books and book signings and other things like that.

The Dragon of Trelian paperback! And stuff.

The Dragon of Trelian comes out in paperback on January 11, 2011. It will have an awesome new cover, which looks like this:

In other news, here are some updates about various things:

1. This July I graduated from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Yay! But also :( because I will miss it very much. But mostly :) because it was two years of hard work and it feels really good to have earned my degree. And I have a whole bunch of wonderful writing friends/classmates/kindred spirits who will continue to be very important to me, even if I won't get to see them quite as regularly now.

2. I am experimenting with new designs for the blog. You are looking at this experiment right now. Like it? Don't like it? Let me know what you think.

3. ARGUS comes out on February 22, 2011. February 22 happens to be my birthday. There will quite possibly be a birthday-book launch party in the works very soon. I can't wait to show you guys the cover—Andréa Wesson's artwork is perfect! But, um, I have to wait, at least a little while longer. But as soon as I'm allowed I will post the cover here.

4. Still working hard on Dragon of Trelian sequel revisions. I'm in the third draft now. Stuff is happening, there is danger and magic and intrigue and there are new characters and old characters and someone may die. That is all I am going to say at this time. The pub date will be sometime in Spring 2012.

5. I am in another Gilbert and Sullivan operetta with The Village Light Opera Group! The show is Iolanthe and we just started rehearsals and performances will be the weekend before Thanksgiving and you should all come to see it. Don't worry, I will remind you as it gets closer.

6. I have joined the crew of Through the Tollbooth, which is a fabulous group blog run by VCFA graduates. There are new posts several times a week on writing-related topics, and you should definitely stop in there and take a look!

I think that's all for now. The summer has been a little crazy, but I'm hoping the fall will prove a little less so, and will include a little more time for posting, among other things. Yeah, I know I say things like that a lot, about how I'm hoping to post more often. I know it doesn't always happen, but I remain ever optimistic about these things.  :)

Scott Magoon!

I am VERY EXCITED to announce that the wonderful Scott Magoon will be illustrating my upcoming picture book BIG MEAN MIKE!

That is all. I just wanted to share. :)

p.s. "Upcoming" in the publishing world is of course not meant to imply "soon to be appearing" in any kind of normal-world-time sense. MIKE is currently tentatively scheduled for Fall 2012. But that is okay, because in the meantime there will be THE DRAGON OF TRELIAN PAPERBACK (this fall!) and ARGUS (2011, illustrated by Andréa Wesson!) and THE DRAGON OF TRELIAN SEQUEL (which will one day have a real title!).

2010 is going to be OK

Just finished my second cup of coffee, which means it is time to get up from the computer and go do things. Mostly today's things will be about packing and getting ready for rez and getting my cat ready to spend ten days at my boyfriend's apartment while I am gone. There are things I wanted to get done before I go that will not get done, and I am deciding to be ok about this.

I think I want to make Deciding to Be Ok about Things my goal for 2010. I spend way too much time worrying about everything (and I mean seriously, EVERYTHING), and while there are some small number of things actually worth worrying about (e.g., health and well-being of friends and family), many of the things I worry about are just not worth it. Some things can just be ok. For example, it is ok that I didn't get all the reading done that I would have liked to do for the residency. It is ok that my apartment is a mess, and that my friend Kristin will see it this way when she comes over to water my plants next week. It is ok that I do not have my whole life figured out, and that I have big questions about lots of significant life things, and that I do not have a five-year plan or a fully updated checkbook register or a functional exercise regimen.

Which is not to say I'm not going to set goals for the coming year or anything like that. Actually the whole point is to direct my energy toward what matters, instead of wasting it on things that don't. I'm going to finish my Trelian sequel by March 1, which is my new deadline and which CANNOT be missed if I want the book to come out when it's supposed to. I'm going to finish the first draft of another novel that I'm working on, hopefully by July. I'm going to fix up my apartment, and paint and get curtains, and I'm going to cook more and try not to spend money like a crazy person. I'm going to exercise more, but it's going to be ok if that takes the form of long walks listening to audiobooks instead of my former ideal of going for runs and rejoining the gym.

I read David Small's Stitches last night (some of the reading for rez that I *did* finish) and by the end I was feeling pretty silly about some of the things in my life that upset me. Seriously, my life is pretty ok, more than ok, and some people have Real Problems and sometimes it helps to remember that and try to put things in perspective. Not that my life is all candy and roses by any means, and of course some things are going to get me down, but there are also many things in my life that I need to remember to be grateful for on a regular basis.

Anyway. I should get up and go do things now, for real. Need to pick up a package at the post office and stop at the bank for laundry and vending machine quarters for school, and pack and pack and transfer files to my laptop and update my iPod and everything else. I doubt I will post anything while I'm away, but if you're interested in getting a glimpse of the goings-on at the residency, VCFA alum Tami Brown will be posting at Through the Tollbooth, and Cynthia Leitich Smith will be tweeting VCFA faculty quotes on her Twitter page.

Bloggety Blog

There probably ARE people who blog less often than I do out there, right? I mean, even excepting all those people who do not actually have blogs. Once again, I am here to promise to do better. And now I will tell you all about how busy I have been and will continue to be and thereby lay the foundation for future infrequent blog posting.

I don't even remember where I left off. I will go check. *Consults previous post* Oh, right. Baltimore Book Festival! It was great. Had a lovely time reading Library Lion and an excerpt from The Dragon of Trelian, and signed some books and chatted with lovely authors and illustrators and bookstore people. And I bought a shirt from these nice folks. Then I spent a couple of days with my nice friends Bridey and Joe and little Evie, and went to Evie's third birthday party at a FARM with a PETTING ZOO and there were CHICKENS and BABY GOATS and OTHER FUN ANIMALS. I gave Evie books for her birthday, of course.

Last weekend I went back to Baltimore for the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association conference, which was awesome. I went two years ago when Library Lion received the 2007 NAIBA Children's Picture Book Award and once again I had a great time. Booksellers are really nice, fun people. And they love books. And there were other nice publishing types and authors and illustrators there as well, and I got to talk to people about the novel and hear about other authors' books and generally just had a wonderful time. Plus I scored so many free books that I had to send a box home from the hotel. Yay!

In other news, I am continuing to work on the sequel to The Dragon of Trelian, the first draft of which will be finished by the end of the year. And I'm still working on my critical thesis for my MFA, which will also be finished by the end of the year, but hopefully sooner—say, by my next packet deadline, which is November 10. ALSO working on a new YA novel for school, which started out great and fun and exciting but has been less great lately...still trying to figure out what the deal is with this story.

What else...on October 17 I will be at the Mandell School Book Fair, and on October 24 I will be reading Library Lion to help celebrate the opening of Brooklyn's new Greenlight Bookstore, and on October 31 I will be reading from The Dragon of Trelian while dressed as a princess at the New York Public Library Shop at the NYPL main branch. And on November 7, I will be at the FABULOUS Rochester Children's Book Festival in Rochester, NY, which is my favorite event to go to every year. This time I'll be doing a joint presentation with Rebecca Stead in addition to signing books and talking with kids and parents and teachers and other authors and anyone else who comes out that day! If you are in the area you should definitely come. This is the 13th year of the festival, and it just keeps getting better and better.

And then on December 12, I'll be reading and signing books at the Elmira Barnes & Noble in Elmira, NY.

And because I apparently did not already have enough on my plate, I am in the ensemble of the Village Light Opera Group's fall production of Starship Pinafore. You should all come see it, because it will be AWESOME and a lot of fun. If you know me personally, you can email me directly for tickets. Otherwise, you can get them online here. Performance dates are:

Friday, November 13 at 8pm
Saturday, November 14 at 8pm
Friday, November 20 at 8pm
Saturday, November 21 at 2pm
Sunday, November 22 at 2pm

And, as always, I have been playing lots of Facebook Scrabble and reading lots of books. (If you are curious about what I'm reading, you can always check out my reading list on Goodreads.)

And I suppose that is enough for this update. I should get back to work!

BIG MEAN MIKE!

I'm very excited to announce that Candlewick will be publishing another picture book written by ME! It's called BIG MEAN MIKE, and that is all I will tell you at this time. :) Pub date still to be determined.

Candlewick will also be publishing my picture book ARGUS in Spring 2011 and the sequel to THE DRAGON OF TRELIAN...at some point after I have finished writing it.

In other news, I have finally updated my website a bit. You can see it here: www.michelleknudsen.com. I like the new colors; the old version was starting to seem a little boring. I'm still planning to have a real redesign at some point by some talented web designer-type person who is not me, but for now I'm having fun playing around with it myself.

In other other news, I had a wonderful time traveling around upstate NY with S. I hiked mountains and caught my first trout and swam in lakes and floated down rivers in tubes and saw a lot of lovely lovely nature.

Here is a picture of me enjoying nature:


And here is a picture of me enjoying nature on my boyfriend's motorcycle (I don't drive it myself, I just ride on the back. So usually he is sitting there in front of me, but in this case he is not because he is taking the picture.) Yes, those are fishing poles lashed to the back. That is the cool way to travel to fishing spots in the Adirondacks, FYI.


And here is a picture of nature for you to enjoy, without me in it:


Now I am back in Brooklyn, trying not to miss the lovely cool lakes and mountains. I am spending a little too much time looking at the pictures...