Thomas and I are very happy to announce the birth of our son, Eliot. We’re healthy and happy (and happy. Did I mention happy?). As a friend of mine said (and I quote), Eliot is a “shweetoo coo coo pookie pookie squishy pwishy pooeypooeypie.”

Now, like any lover of books worth her salt (or ink, or paper), I cherish Jane Austen. And so does Stephen Colbert! Here is a very funny retelling of the sport of baseball through the lens of Austen manners and romance (the baseball-Austen thing starts at 1:45).

Lastly, I’ve created a FAQ page about The Cabinet of Wonders. Here it is.

I may not post again for a while, as I have some Very Important Business to attend to tomorrow morning. But I promise to update as soon as I can, with images that are even cuter than a baby dressed like a spider, than a pygmy hippo in water, than Americans exercising their right to vote, than a boy with sweet potato in his hair. Of course, I will be TOTALLY biased.

This is my polling station, which I can see from my window. The line looks pretty short, and I’m about to get in it. Don’t forget to vote today! If you don’t know where your polling station is, Google can help you find it.

Well, sort of. It’s baby Julia, my friend’s daughter, dressed as a spider for Halloween. Too adorable!

The sun is going down in New York City, and it is a glorious day for trick-or-treaters. Everyone will be able to show off their costumes instead of covering them up with coats and hats and scarves. Halloween in NYC is fun….but I have to confess I’m feeling a little wistful for a good, old fashioned Midwestern Halloween. I’m remembering the smell and taste of pumpkin seeds roasted in the oven by my mom after me and my sibs gutted our pumpkins. Jack-o-lanterns are the best. The other day, I said to my husband that I was sad that we wouldn’t be able to make jack-o-lanterns with our son.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Rats!” I replied. “Cockroaches! Where would we keep a carved pumpkin? All the pests in NYC would eat it and us alive!”

“Maybe our next apartment will have a balcony,” he said. “And we can keep a jack-o-lantern there.”

Well, we can dream. Of course, that would just mean that we’d have rats and cockroaches on our balcony at the end of October, but maybe it’d be worth it.

Do you notice an astonishing similarity between the cover art and the cover art of a certain other book?

That’s right! The books are totally different genres, but there’s a similar, woodblock-like quality to the cover art. That’s because David Frankland did them both! I love his work, and am so, so fortunate that he’s doing the covers for my books. Wait until you see the cover for my second novel, The Celestial Globe.

The Good Thief is about an orphan boy named Ren who knows nothing of his past, or why he is missing a hand. Like the other boys in the orphanage, he longs to be adopted. But he lives in a hardscrabble time of wagons and horses, bottled ink, and shotguns, so his deformity is something that will bring him pity but never, it seems, love, respect, or a family. But then he is adopted by a man named Benjamin, who claims that Ren is his long-lost brother. Benjamin turns out to be a con artist who has adopted Ren precisely because of his missing hand. As Ren helps Benjamin trick people out of their money, we see that Benjamin’s greatest skill is his ability to seduce people with a good story.

What Benjamin’s real story is—or Ren’s—isn’t clear to me yet, but I’m enjoying the novel so far. I love the odd characters—everybody in this book seems to have a deformity, whether it’s a toothless dentist, a near-deaf woman, or people who are so tender-hearted they’re easily tricked. And the scene where Benajmin feeds Ren slices of an orange is really beautiful.

Speaking of hands, my friend Mordicai sent me this image:

It’s by an artist named Taint Tin. Mordicai asks if Petra is going to get a mechanical tin hand in the future…who knows?

Now, in my household of two (well, three if you count my cat), the big topic of conversation is the economy. Ok, I guess that’s a big topic for lots of people right now. But it’s especially interesting to talk things over with my husband because he’s a finance economist at NYU and runs/contributes to a blog about the current crisis. Check it out.

About a week ago, I was at a bar with several other New York-based writers of young adult fiction, and we were wondering what the economic downturn will mean for writers and readers. So, what do you think? If you’re a writer (or editor, bookseller, etc.), how do you think the publishing world will change? Will it change? If you’re a reader, will your reading habits change?

Then Colbert adds that, in Roman times, soldiers were paid in salt, and that it is from this tradition that we get the word “salary.” Now, sometimes Colbert says things that have a ring of truth, and this etymology sounded right to me. I mean, “salary”-sel (French)-salt. Plus, salt used to be extremely valuable, since it was one of the few ways to preserve food (and it tastes good). So I looked up “salary” in my beloved Oxford English Dictionary. And, indeed! Stephen Colbert was right! Except that soldiers weren’t paid in salt—they were allotted a certain amount of money to purchase salt. 

Speaking of news sources getting things right, check out The Wall Street Journal’s article “What History Tells Us about the Market.” Writer Jason Zweig gets points for writing a fascinating, clear article about why we should take heart during this economic crisis. But he gets major English Literature Nerd points (the only points that matter in my book) for quoting my girl Emily Dickinson! The poem is “After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes”:

This is the Hour of Lead— 
Remembered, if outlived, 
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow— 
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.

Brilliant. Emily D.’s words are brilliant, of course, but so is Zweig’s use of them, because he’s trying to describe something called the “disposition effect” (or, as Zweig puts it, a “collective stupor”) which is what happens soon after your pained reaction to the fact that you have just lost a fourth (or third, or half) of your savings. First, it really hurts. Then, you grow numb to it—the “disposition effect.” This is when you just can’t bear to think about having lost so much money, and you can’t bring yourself to do anything about it. It turns out that this can be a good thing, because it prevents people from making rash decisions. Who knew that Emily Dickinson could explain the economy?

Yes, somebody has a huge tattoo of John Dee staring into a crystal ball. Thanks to Sarah for sharing this with me!

While I was in Boston earlier this week, I did an interview with The Harvard Crimson about The Cabinet of Wonders, creative writing, and a strange use of an Underwood typewriter. Here it is. Thank you, Naomi, for talking with me!

“You’re the only French person I know who says that,” I told her.

“Zut?”

“Yeah, it’s very cute, for a swear word.” (“Zut” is the French equivalent of “darn it!”)

“What about Thomas? Doesn’t he say it?”

“Are you kidding? My husband swears like a French sailor.”

Then, last night, she said it again: “Zut alors!”

I laughed. “Esther, you remind me of the crazy French cook in The Little Mermaid.” She didn’t know what I meant, so I showed her:

I loved my trip to Boston. I did a reading at Harvard and got to see lots of friends and former students. The audience asked wicked smart questions! So did the people who came to a reading I did at the Boston University Barnes and Noble with the fabulous Donna Freitas, author of the many-starred YA romance The Possibilities of Sainthood.

And now, if you would like to learn about my favorite things and deep dark secrets, here is an interview I did with The Longstockings, a group of awesome, stripey-socked authors (for the interview, just scroll down their site a little).