....which means, "Thank you very much!" in Japanese! (at least according to my Google sources.) Why am I expressing exuberant gratitude in Japanese?? Because I woke up this morning to the news that there was a bidding war among Japanese publishers for the rights to publish the Holt Sisters Trilogy (BATS, WTBW and TSTS) in Japanese, and we sold them for, shall we say, an extremely heart-warming sum. :) (Let's just say I briefly lost the feeling in my extremities when I was informed, and then I accidentally hung up on my agent's Foreign Rights Director, because my jaw dropped and pressed the "end" button on my phone.) So let's raise a toast to our Japanese friends, and to my lovely and gifted agent and his lovely and gifted staff. :) So this now means that my books will be published (or have been published) in Poland, Germany, France, Russia, The Czech Republic, China, Spain and Japan. This is one of the best parts of being an author, as far as I'm concerned—the possibility of connecting with people everywhere through stories.
In other fab news: We have a title for my next Pennyroyal Green book—The Dangers of Desire. How hot is that?? I love it! And the cover will be an appropriately dangerously sexy deep red, as sophisticated and sensual as POP's.
And speaking of POP: below is a very cool countdown widget the HarperCollins provides for authors. Studies show that it's much healthier to stare at the seconds ticking away on countdown widgets than at the Amazon rank. Hee! Just kidding. (Though it's probably only a matter of time before someone actually does a study like that.) But feel free to spread the POP widget around if you want!! Click on "get this widget" to grab the code or get it in some other format suitable for putting on your blog or website, etc. Because God only knows I don't want to be alone in my latest obsession. :)
Hope everyone is grand! We had a little rainstorm here, and now it's sunny and quite oddly warm. Not that I'm complaining in the least. :)