Last weekend I went to Texas for my very first time, and it was great. I had pickle chips, saw a friend from grad school for dinner, talked about Dickens and Peter Pan with him, met tons of smart, adorable children, and had a great reading with Book People. Thanks so much to everyone at Book People for making this happen!

My reading at Book People was with the fabulous Jacqueline Kelly, Newbery Honor winner for novel The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, which I’m reading now and love. Here we are:

One of the students (at Valley View Elementary, I believe. And, FYI, this happens to also be the name of my elementary school in Illinois) took at look at the cover of my second book and asked if those are zombies on the cover.

It was a good question, and for those of you who are curious about The Celestial Globe, which will be in bookstores on April 13, I will tell you what I told him: no, they are not. But they are a lot like zombies. They are creatures I made up, and they are called the Gray Men (or, sometimes, Gristleki). For the even curiouser, I’ll say that I had the idea for them while watching the movie The Lives of Others, which has nothing to do with zombies or zombie-esque creatures, but has a very gray color scheme. I found myself thinking a lot about the color gray, and how lifeless it is, and about the horrible things people can do to each other. And I thought of the Gray Men. Here, if you like, is a creepy scene from The Celestial Globe featuring them:

Even before Petra reached the edge of town, she saw smoke. She shoved past people on the street. When she burst through the last ring of houses, she saw the Sign of the Compass. It was burning.

She was only a few feet from her home and calling for her father when the first of the Gristleki slipped onto its two feet. Three more Gray Men oozed out of their crouched positions. Petra had seen nothing but the flames. She didn’t notice the Gristleki until they moved.

She skidded to a stop. The four creatures slithered towards her, their claws squealing against the cobblestones. They could have seized the girl immediately. They moved slowly because they liked it. They liked to savor the fear that would freeze her face as they grew closer.

The Gristleki were the color of ash, and covered in scales. Their skin was dry and cracked, as if something had sucked the fluids out of their bodies. But the most horrifying feature of the Gristleki was their shape. It was human. Even though they looked like skeletons with snakeskin stretched over the bones, and even though claws sprang from their hands and feet, the creatures looked like they had once been men. Four scaly skulls slipped closer towards Petra. Their faces had no lips. They had no eyebrows or eyelashes, as if they had been burned away. But their eyes were human.

One of them opened its toothless mouth. Petra stared into the black hole. She tried to move, but her legs were rooted to the earth.

“Petra!” Astrophil was shouting in her ear. “Listen to me: you have to run. Do you hear me? Petra!”