I woke up screaming in the dark. I woke up alone. I didn’t know who I was, where I was,
or how I got there. But I learned. I fought. I survived. I still don’t know who I was,
but now I know who I am. And I’m not alone anymore.

Friends, fans, Junkies, lend me your ears. Okay, fine, your eyes, because this is a letter — stop being a smart-ass already, will ya?

I want to tell you something about my next novel, ALIVE, due out Summer of 2015. It’s different. And not different like that one uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving and smells of patchouli oil, I mean different from anything of mine you’ve ever read. I want to prepare your faces. This letter is all of nine paragraphs long, so read it for me. Because you’re swell like that.

ALIVE is the story of a twelve-year-old girl who wakes up to a nightmare. To say her upbringing was “conservative” is an understatement. I can’t explain why, I can’t reveal what that means, but I can say that telling a story from a child’s perspective is something you haven’t seen from me before, not in novel-length.

So, yeah — different. Is this “YA,” what the fancy-pants big-wigs in those tall New York City publishers offices call “young adult?” The narrator is twelve years old, man. So … maybe? You’ll experience the story through her young mind, her limited life experiences and her pre-adolescent frame of reference.

Different, but also, not as different as you might expect. It’s still written by me, and the rotten apple only falls so far from the haunted tree. Our girl is thrown into a boiling vat of awful and has to fight her way out. There is pain, there is terror, there is loss, and — this is a Sigler story, after all — there is blood.

And now, a sooper-secret secret: At New York Comic Con, Oct 10-13 in the Big Apple, something is afoot.

If you attend, and you go to the Del Rey booth, they have a little trinket to promote ALIVE. Go there, get the staff’s attention and then scream the following line in your best overly dramatic, over-the-top, SyFy Original, Shatneresque delivery.

“The spear! The spear!”

Do that. Get something. Squeal with delight.