I'm a bit flabbergasted, really, at the continuing popularity of that quirky little novel-illustrated-with-photos I wrote awhile back, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list last June and has remained there, somewhat stubbornly, for 56 weeks now. This bestseller-ness is something of an abstract concept (what does that mean? how many books? etc), but to put things in context Quirk Books crunched some numbers and used the results to create a nice infographic, which among other factoids points out that if you stacked up all the copies Miss P has sold to-date, they would be taller than Mount Everest:

In other words, I should feel very lucky, and I do. It's been a year of meeting engaged readers and passionate booksellers and librarians and being pleasantly weirded out by the fact that strangers seem to be at least dimly aware of who I am (this happens at book conferences and the like, not at, you know, the mall), and being made to feel welcome in this little corner of the book universe we call YA by a cadre of brilliant and charming and disarmingly unpretentious writers, several of whom I am grateful now to call friends. Even without an Everest-surpassing stack of sold books, all of that would've made for a very excellent year.

Hey, how about a little Q&A?

Q: When's the next Miss Peregrine book?

I'm working on it now! But second books are hard, especially if you want them not to suck, which I do. It'll be coming out in 2013 though exactly when in 2013 I'm not sure yet.

Q: What do I do till then?

You can pre-order Talking Pictures, my purdy coffee table book of captioned found photographs which comes out October 16th. Think of it this way: if Miss Peregrine was a story I made up about photographs I found, then Talking Pictures is photos that already have stories attached to them, written by anonymous hands years ago. (If you haven't seen the video where I explain what the heck a "talking picture" is, watch it here.) And oh, oh! There's a new cover for the book, which I'm really fond of:

Q: Are you doing any signings or events in my town?

I'll be at Comic-Con on Friday, July 13, for a signing at Quirk Books' booth, #1636, at 2pm. And I'll be giving away photos from my vintage photo collection! I don't have any signings scheduled after that, but things are always cropping up at the last minute, so I'll be sure and trumpet it from the treetops if something gets set up.

Q: Are you going to make any more videos?

Yes! I'm just not sure when. They take me forever, and book-writing also takes forever, and because I get paid to write books but not to make videos, book-writing tends to win. But I really miss making videos, and if I don't get back to it soon I'll be super pissed at myself. So: yes!

Thanks again for an amazing year. I can't wait to see what the next one brings.

So I've been off in writing-Miss-Peregrine-Book-Two land and haven't been posting much on the ol' bloggy-blog, but that's going to change, I sort-of promise! I felt like I had to pop my head out of my cave to at least acknowledge the ongoing unlikeliness and insanity of Miss Peregrine still, eight months and counting after its publication, occupying a rather prominant spot on the bestseller list. Which is in itself nothing short of amazing. But still more amazing is that I managed to hang on long enough to be list-neighbors with my dear old friend John Green, whose astoundingly good novel The Fault in Our Stars has held the #1 spot the last few weeks (which it richly deserves). It is, as John himself pointed out, a weird and magical thing. (It would be slightly more magical, I suppose, if Rick Riordan and I could switch places for a week, but still.)

A lot of other amazing things have happened in the last 34 weeks, as well, not least of which is that the Miss Peregrine movie went from being a twinkle in Fox's eye to being a project with Tim Burton attached as director and Jane Goldman, who wrote X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass and The Woman in Black, adapting the screenplay. (And by the way, a lot of people ask me if I am bothered by other people writing/directing the adaptation of my book, since I make movies and write scripts too. When it's Tim Burton and Jane Goldman who are doing the writing and directing, the answer is easy: Not. In. The. Slightest.)

Also, does this Woman in Black poster remind you of anything? Ahem! Just sayin'.

I'm just back from a two week road trip around Iceland, and have a new photo essay about it up on mental floss. Check it out!

Everyone's been asking me, so I figured I'd put it out there in boldface type: YES!  In fact, I just got back from a whirlwind trip around the country to hunt down a new crop of peculiar photos for book 2. I scored lots of great images -- now I just have to figure out how to use them! But that, as they say, is the fun part.

It's been an incredible few weeks since Miss Peregrine was published. It's difficult to overstate just how incredible. Suffice to say that I'm very good at keeping my expectations low in order to avoid serious disappointment. Before Miss Peregrine came out, I was just hoping that it would find an audience of any size -- that this strange little book full of odd black-and-white photographs and what seemed like risky plot twists would resonate with some readers, gain a little cult following, and maybe garner a few nice reviews. After all, my intrepid publisher, Quirk Books, didn't have gobs of money to throw at a splashy marketing campaign. They put together an eye-catching package for the book (as they always do), but the marketplace is crowded; the world is fuller than ever of books, movies, games; stories in every form imaginable, all loudly competing for attention. So as the book release approached, despite enthusiasm and encouragement from early reviewers and bloggers who'd read adv