Part 1: With This Puzzle I Thee Wed

When my Mystery Hunt team received the wedding invitation shown above, speculation immediately ran rampant as to who M & G might be. There had been a Hunt years ago that also began with a wedding, of the video-game characters Mario & Peach — maybe Mario was now leaving Peach for… uh, GLaDOS, from Portal?

And then somebody suggested that the wedding might be for our friends Mark Gottlieb and Gaby Weidling. They are both game and puzzle designers, and years ago Mark attended MIT in large part because of his fascination with the Mystery Hunt; he actually created one of them mostly (and maybe entirely) on his own, back in an era where this was possible. During my team’s discussions of whether or not Mark and Gaby would prove to be the weekend’s M & G, no one expressed the slightest objection to the idea that they would want to get married in an MIT lecture center in front of hundreds of puzzlers, some dressed in costume. Of course they would. But that didn’t mean that was the plan.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a weekend-long event featuring some of the toughest, trickiest puzzles you could ever hope to see. Each Hunt is centered around a different theme, and that theme is usually a closely kept secret — although sometimes the organizing team allows a hint or two to spill out, as with the above wedding invitation. I figured we would still need to wait for the event itself for confirmation.

But then I ran into Mark while walking with a friend to a pre-Hunt escape room. (The local escape room companies were pretty happy that thousands of puzzle nuts had rolled into town.) Mark was with his sister-in-law and two nieces. After a brief conversation, he said with deadpan dryness, “Pay no attention to the fact that I’m here with my extended family.”

So, wow. This was a genuine turn of events. Not only would the Mystery Hunt begin with the wedding of two great people, but we knew what the Hunt theme would be before the fact. Unprecedented!

How, we then wondered, would the matrimonial theme be tied to the many dozens of puzzles we would solve over the weekend? Here’s how:

At the Hunt’s kickoff, an officiant — himself a puzzler — assured us that we were in fact about to see an actual wedding. The groom was introduced. Mark came out to applause and said with deadpan dryness, “Thank you. I hope nothing goes wrong.”

The wedding procession began. The bride was beautiful. The whole thing was deeply moving. The officiant opened his mouth to begin the ceremony, and suddenly a young girl dressed as Cupid ran out on stage yelling “Stop the wedding!”

It seemed that evil ninjas had stolen all of the love in the world, had condensed it to a single dense core of love, and had hidden it somewhere on the MIT campus. For some reason, they had left behind a number of difficult puzzles that would lead to this hiding place. If only there were hundreds of puzzle solvers available to help crack these devious enigmas! Unfortunately, tragically, the wedding would need to be postponed until—

“Found it!” said Gaby, who had run off stage while all this was being explained. She was now back, waving a heart-shaped object that was, presumably, a dense core made up of all the love in the world. The Hunt was over! The wedding was back on!

And so Mark and Gaby were married, and an audience full of puzzlers applauded and wiped their eyes a whole lot.

The newlyweds then gave us an unexpected gift: They invited us along on their honeymoon.

Mark and Gaby planned to go that most magnificent of amusement parks, Penny Park. Unfortunately, the park had fallen on hard times; it just wasn’t the same as when Penny’s grandmother used to run the show. In order to return the park to its former glory, what it needed was buzz, lots of buzz. The kind of buzz generated (for reasons that remain a bit obscure) by solving puzzles! If only there were hundreds of puzzle solvers available to crack some devious enigmas!

And so the Hunt organizers had kept the theme under wraps after all — the wedding invitation was merely a spectacular fake-out. Hunters spent the weekend exploring the rides and attractions at Penny Park, with a puzzle for each and every one.

Part 2: Excelerating the Difficulty

My Mystery Hunt team, Palindrome, is one of the event’s larger teams — the organizers had suggested that teams cap themselves at 75 or so, but we wound up somewhere just north of 100, when you count both our on-campus solvers and our remote solvers working from the comfort of their living rooms.

If you are unfamiliar with the Hunt, you might be saying to yourself: 100 people solving puzzles together? Did you complete the event in fifteen minutes? Not hardly. In the end, only five teams out of 150 completed the Mystery Hunt in its entirety. My army of puzzlers was the second to do so. When I say that the Hunt is made up of the toughest, trickiest puzzles you’ve ever seen, I am not exaggerating for effect. And there were nearly 200 of them. We started solving on Friday afternoon and crossed the finish line about fifty hours later — and only because we worked around the clock, making sure we had solvers covering the “graveyard shift.” Without that, we would have had no chance at all of finishing.

How hard are these puzzles? Well, let’s take a look at one example, shall we? I present to you: The Excelerator.

A lot of Mystery Hunt puzzles present an initial obstacle, one I have a hard time surmounting even after twenty years. Call it the intimidation factor. There are a lot of puzzles over Hunt weekend that I cannot hope to solve, as I simply don’t have the necessary background — Hunters will find many puzzles about science, or deep math, or programming. It’s easy to glance at a puzzle and say: “Nope! This is clearly a puzzle for somebody who is not me.” That’s the intimidation factor, and Excelerator had it in spades.

Solvers who are used to puzzles looking a certain way — a grid of letters, perhaps some artful clues, and so forth — will be forgiven for reeling backwards when they open up Excelerator and come face to face with this (click to enlarge):

Yes, the puzzle exists entirely within a massive Excel spreadsheet — 700,000 cells, each containing either a random-seeming trio of letters or an equally random-seeming number. I looked at this puzzle for ten seconds and gingerly shut it back down again.

But in fact, getting started on this puzzle is not that difficult. You see those cells containing red letters? There are eleven of them, and those are your starting points. From each one you can trace out a clue. For example, starting at the MOU (in cell C6), you can move cell to cell and spell out MOUNTAIN FAMOUS FOR BEING INCREDIBLY HIGH. You might even notice that those cells, shaded in, form a letter A.

So what mountain is famous for being incredibly high? Everest? Sure, but there are other very tall mountains — like, for example, K2, which is the second-tallest mountain and also a cell in this spreadsheet. Sure enough, if we go to cell K2, we can trace out another clue (in the shape of another letter), the answer to which is that legendary cruise ship, the QE2. And if you go to cell QE2… okay, you’re getting it.

Ultimately, after locating and deciphering a LOT of clues, you wind up with a list of words like SUMAC — words that begin with Excel commands, followed by a column or cell in the spreadsheet. The word SUMAC, for example, instructs you to take the SUM of column AC. Do that and you get a total of 12. The 12th letter of the alphabet is L. Figure out what letter you get from each of these final “command” words, and you wind up with your answer: LINE NUMBERS.

I guess that’s still pretty intimidating.

But if you can imagine 200 puzzles at this level of extreme craftiness, maybe you can grasp why even a team of 100 die-hard solvers might struggle to reach the end of the Mystery Hunt.

Part 3: Puzzles To Keep You Up At Night

If I didn’t wade into the Excelerator spreadsheet up to my neck, what did I spend my time on? A whole lot. For example:

Storybook Pals: As a Mystery Hunt team solves puzzles, the answers they collect come together to form a “metapuzzle.” Solving a metapuzzle is a big deal — it’s a giant step toward the event’s finish line. We have a lot of superb solvers on my team — people who can crack a much-needed metapuzzle long before all of the necessary answers that feed into it have been collected. The moments where I have been the person to break into a meta have been among the headiest of my puzzling career.

On one metapuzzle last year or maybe two years ago, I had a strong notion of what the solution path might be. I chased my idea down that path a short way, didn’t see anything promising, and gave up… and then, hours later, learned that I had been correct, after somebody else found that same solution path and took it to the winner’s circle. If cracking a meta is the pinnacle of puzzling, then having the right idea on a meta but screwing it up has got to be one of the lows.

Storybook Pals was another low. I thought early on that the answers in the round should criss-cross together, but at that time I didn’t have enough answers to get anywhere — and by the time we did, somebody else had already solved the puzzle. Whee!

But in truth this was a good year for me and metapuzzles. I never had the explosive aha moment, the one that causes the room to burst into cheers and applause, but I made suggestions along the way that proved helpful and accurate, and that’s at least something. I’ll take it.

Tall Tales: The puzzle was presented as eighteen short videos, each depicting the same sedate white-haired man, the sort of man who seems to have been born a grandfather, sitting on a sofa, reading from a book entitled “Tall Tales.” A sample tale:

There I was, just minding my business, when I don’t know how many thousand caped superheroes—you know who I mean—showed up in town. I remember, because it was the same day I bequeathed my factory to Willy Wonka. I had already invented one thousand items like chocolate bars and gobstoppers and lollipops, and it was time to move on to new challenges.

Here was a rare example of me knowing what to do every step of the way: I recognized that each tall tale contained a reference to “thousands” of something (“thousands of caped superheroes”), and another reference to a specific quantity (“one thousand items like chocolate bars”). I understood that each of these was a clue to something, and soon after saw that these clues must lead to units of measurement both common and obscure. Sure enough, there is an ancient unit called the BATMAN and another unit called the CANDY; these were supposedly used in commerce in Persia. (I said they were obscure.) “There are twenty candys in a batman,” is a thing I actually said this weekend. Making that conversion gave you a number of thousands between 1 and 26. Taking the appropriate letter spelled out a phrase.

We solved this puzzle at 2:00 a.m., long after my brother Dan, one of my teammates on Palindrome, had gone home to get some sleep. The next morning when he came in I said to him, “While you were gone, there was a puzzle about measurements. What was the answer?”

He blinked at me. “What? How should I know?”

“Let me say put it a different way,” I said. “There was a puzzle about measurements at the MIT Mystery Hunt. What was the answer?”

“Oh.” Enlightenment dawned on Dan’s face. “Smoot.”

Of course it was. Oliver Smoot went from ordinary undergrad to MIT legend in the early 1960s, when as a fraternity pledge he was made to lay down repeatedly across the span of the Harvard Bridge, thus measuring it in “smoots,” a unit that has gained enough fame that it’s actually in the American Heritage Dictionary.

And this puzzle went from ordinary MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle to legend because the puzzlewriters actually got Oliver Smoot himself, now a sedate white-haired grandfather-type, to be the narrator of their book of tall tales.

Spaghetti Western: A personal first: A Mystery Hunt puzzle that mentions me by name. Some years ago I invented a silly game where participants try to “solve” a puzzle that is in fact just a bunch of random words. I called it “Spaghetti,” because in an old magazine article about puzzles, I wrote that some of my friends were so smart, they could solve a plate of spaghetti. I usually run a round or two of the game in the days leading up Mystery Hunt — and this year I was specifically asked to do so by Larry Hosken, one of this puzzle’s co-authors. I promised that I would, and then I forgot. Sorry, Larry! Your puzzle was really fun, though!

Concierge Services: A delightful and relatively easy puzzle that brought great glee to my team as they watched me talk to the organizing team on the phone, and then watched my face when the organizing team hung up on me. Eventually we figured out that the questions we were being asked could all be punnily answered with the name of a Tony-winning musical. (What did Tiger Woods say after he missed the putt? “Bye, Bye Birdie.”)

Creative Pictures Studio: The early rounds of the Hunt were fairly standard affairs, as these things go: Great, solid puzzles, and interesting metapuzzles that required just the right amount of aha to crack. But then we ventured into the outer areas of the amusement park. (Remember how this hunt is themed to an amusement park?) The four outer areas cranked up the innovation, on a scale of 1 to 10, to about a 15. In the Creative Pictures Studio round, the answer to each puzzle was not a word or a phrase but an emoji — you literally had to paste a desert island emoji into the answer submission box, and not the words “desert island.” And then all of those emoji were used in a wild braintwister of a meta, in which the growing pool of symbols were used to spell out the plots of ten different movies. This was easily the puzzle that led to the most raucous debates in our HQ, as we tried on and discarded different movies, trying to find the ones that fit.

The Pennies: I actually had nothing to do with solving this, one of the final puzzles of the Hunt, but it was such a beautiful touch that I can’t let it go unmentioned. Each metapuzzle we solved in Penny Park earned us a new pressed penny. You know those machines they have at tourist spots around the world? Put in a penny (along with fifty cents to pay for your souvenir) and you’ll get a flattened oval upon which is etched the Lincoln Memorial or whatever? The Hunt organizers brought in ten such presses, and allowed us puzzlers to press our own pennies, and of course those pennies formed an elegant puzzle of their own. It was a lovely, nostalgic way to make a puzzle leap off the page or the computer screen.

Part 4: The End?

Looming over this brilliantly created event was the feeling that the Mystery Hunt might soon need to transform itself or fade away entirely. Every year, more people from outside the school are drawn to the Hunt, and the MIT administration has grown increasingly disgruntled at the idea of thousands of non-students running around campus, unregistered and untended. The Mystery Hunt may be one of the premier puzzle events in the country, with a long and storied history, but the administrators, it is clear, see it primarily as a potential liability nightmare. This year the ruling came down: If your team has no MIT students, you cannot stay in your campus headquarters overnight.

Since overnight solving is one of the great joys of the Hunt, this threw everyone into a tizzy. My team, which in fact has no students (despite years of trying), scrambled like mad trying to find an auxiliary HQ — ultimately we rented a house nearby through VRBO, an Airbnb competitor, and other teammates set up shop in various hotel lobbies. Irony #1: We wound up having our most productive overnight shifts in years. Irony #2: Because the school wanted all of the no-MIT-student teams in one place, our on-campus rooms were switched at the last moment… to by far the nicest HQ we’ve had in decades, including a room with a long conference table that facilitated group solving beautifully.

The new rules imposed this year will likely not be the end of the matter, and right now it feels like the day is looming — though I hope I am wrong — that I learn that because my team has no MIT representation (except for many alumni and one member of the faculty), we are no longer welcome to participate in the Hunt.

I don’t feel “entitled” to access to the school’s resources or goodwill, and I am deeply appreciative of the time I have gotten to spend on campus, solving puzzles with friends and reveling in the school’s bursting-at-the-seams braininess, creativity, and eccentricity. I realize this is a gift that can be taken away from me at any time, and if that happens, what can I do except thank the school for its generosity over the past 23 years.

I sure hope they can find a way to accommodate us, though.

Final note: Palindrome was gunning for a win this year, but despite solving at what I thought was a damn impressive speed, the {plane noise} Galactic Trendsetters {plane noise} outmatched us every step of the way. Those are some bright kids over there. Congratulations to them, and I am excited to see what they create for next year’s Hunt. Hey GT: As much as I enjoyed this year’s event, might I gently suggest a Mystery Hunt that more than five teams can finish?

I started off the new year puzzling hundreds of kids at The Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY. Read all about it here.

Every month, Puzzled Pint presents a mini puzzle hunt at bars around the country. On February 11th, I’ll be your friendly puzzlemaster, presenting a mini hunt called Circular Reasoning.

Mark your calendars and look here for more info: http://www.puzzledpint.com/

My latest crossword for the New York Times appears in today’s paper. Apparently my last Tuesday puzzle was way back in 2004!

Today is launch day for my latest book of word searches for kids! 54 puzzles, with a few unexpected tricks along the way. Get it at your favorite bookstore or at Amazon.

My friends at Puzzability have been crafting wonderful, ingenious puzzles for decades, and today heralds the release of their second puzzle book for kids, Puzzlelopedia. I had the opportunity to help out a little with this book late in its production, as a test-solver and proofreader, so I’m well-positioned to assure you that this book is stuffed with an absolutely dazzling variety of puzzles, not to mention the occasional article delving into some fascinating facet of wordplay. Young solvers will dive into this and never want to come out. Their previous book, The Brainiest Insaniest Ultimate Puzzle Book, remains available as well, and also gets my highest recommendation.

Puzzles are not normally thought of as a hobby requiring much by way of endurance. If you like to run, perhaps you will decide to train for a marathon — building up your stamina bit by bit until you can do the whole 26 miles. While you’re doing that, we puzzlers are stretched out on the sofa, clipboards in hand, content to leave the strenuous pastimes to other folks.

But even as sedentary a hobby as puzzling has its hardcore adherents. Look around a little and maybe you’ll find a “puzzle hunt” in your town, one that will take you from place to place, solving crafty puzzles with a team of friends for two or three hours. If you enjoy that, you might decide to step up and participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long event requiring the brainpower of a team of dozens of dedicated solvers.

The Mystery Hunt has gotten its share of media coverage over the years, and you might believe, after reading one article or another about the annual event, that this is the top of the mountain — that puzzlers can’t possibly get more fanatical than this.

Well. Let me introduce you to “The Game.”

Since its origins on the West Coast in the 1970s, the Game has specialized in over-the-top puzzles that leap dramatically off the page — and that participating teams solve while driving around in a van for 24 to 36 sleepless hours. Early versions of the Game may have gone a little too over the top: Wikipedia describes a puzzle, if that’s the word for it, in which a team member was left at a strip club “stripped of all clothes and spectacles, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown.”

More recent iterations of the Game have been less likely to embarrass or threaten its participants, but the endurance component remains a core feature of the event. The latest version of the Game, Miskatonic University, was held in the Boston area this past weekend. After a fun Friday night introductory event, things really got going Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m…. and ended the following day at 4:00 in the afternoon. Somewhere in there I took a couple of fifteen or twenty-minute naps.

Miskatonic was a H.P. Lovecraft-themed puzzle event created by an army of kick-ass volunteers headed up by Sarah Leadbeater, with puzzles by constructors Nathan Curtis and Nathan Fung. Did the puzzles, as advertised, leap dramatically off the page? To some extent, yes. Sometimes, and especially in the first half of the event, they were variations on familiar puzzle types, set in offbeat locations. We were excited for what might await us at a miniature golf course, but what awaited us was a small maze puzzle that we solved sitting at a picnic table. Similarly, we were delighted when we went to a “children’s center” and were handed a school-cafeteria milk carton — but inside the carton was a fairly standard diagramless crossword.

Other puzzles more successfully used their environments. Some of the puzzles at the Friday night event, for example, could have been solved in your own living room with only minor modifications — but it was a thrill to solve them instead at Hammond Castle, the gorgeous medieval castle that was plonked down in Gloucester, MA in the 1920s.

Solvers who found the puzzles fun but were expecting a little more zing were rewarded by their patience: Saturday night, teams were sent to a community center and were met with a suite of puzzles bursting with innovation: A “beer pong” puzzle put a bunch of classic red Solo cups to creative use; another puzzle was locked in a gorgeous puzzle box that could only be opened with the crafty use of an assortment of gears; and most brilliant of all was a simple guess-the-word puzzle enlivened to the max by a Ouija board whose planchette moved all by itself (with the help of magnets and some ingenious programming).

I had the good fortune to be on one of the event’s stronger teams, anchored by Dan Katz, who routinely grasps in a matter of moments puzzles that are meant to take much longer. (Glancing briefly at a bunch of stacked-up specimen jars, each containing a sad little stuffed animal: “A lot of them are missing at least one eye. Have you tried counting up the eyes and seeing if they form Braille?”) We and a handful of other teams pretty much had the run of the community center for the first hour, solving puzzles alone in a room that would become much more crowded later on. By the time all 34 teams had arrived, the center was a scene of bustling chaos, held together admirably by Sarah Leadbeater, who seemed to be everywhere simultaneously — helping stuck teams, fixing broken puzzle elements, redirecting teams from too-crowded rooms to slightly less crowded ones. The puzzles were the main event, but her awesome powers of organization were a dazzling sideshow.

After the night at the community center, teams hit the road again, and by sunrise were at an Irish lodge for breakfast and my favorite puzzle of the weekend. The walls of the lodge were decorated with children’s drawings. We were instructed to make a drawing of our own, and were given crayons for the task. But, aha: This was still a Lovecraft-themed event, and the drawings were all charming depictions of multi-eyed tentacle monsters. And we couldn’t simply create any old multi-eyed tentacle monster — we had to create one that perfectly matched its name (“Thaathlog”). What did this mean? It meant analyzing the drawings on the wall and the names of the various monsters to determine the rules for monster creation. For example, it turned out that the color of each monster was determined by looking at which ROYGBIV letter was contained the most times by the monster’s name, and if a second ROYGBIV letter appeared, well, now you knew what color to make the monster’s spots. There were seven or eight such rules to suss out, some quite tricky — it was a just-right balance of puzzle challenge and theatricality. Also, our monster, drawn by teammate Jennifer Braun, came out great.

We left the lodge a couple of hours shy of the event’s 24-hour mark, and my whole team was feeling pretty weary. Nonetheless, there were more puzzles to solve, including a reconstruction of the Greenway Labyrinth with letter-strewn magnetic strips, and a Jenga tower constructed by following a set of clues.

The event’s finale took place in a field on the edge of Boston’s Public Garden. I took one look at what they were setting up and said “No, sorry, this is where I draw the line.” At nearly the 30-hour mark, in the bright August sunshine, they were clearly preparing some kind of athletic event. This turned out to be a funny variation on Simon Says — or rather, Cthulhu Says. It had something to do with racing to be the first team to complete a mosaic made of Rubik’s Cubes — I didn’t entirely follow it, except to see that most people found it great silly fun.

Our graduation from Miskatonic U ended on a bit of a sour note: the event’s organizers — exemplary in every other way — had neglected to print enough of the final puzzle, the one that would tie all of the previous answers together. My team was one of the unlucky ones that didn’t get a final puzzle, and it was a bit like binging a long, magnificent television series and then the last five minutes of the final episode cuts out. And then when we did finally get the missing puzzle, important instructions had been torn away, leaving us stuck and frustrated for longer than was necessary. A bit of a downer that might not even be worth mentioning except that it was literally the final moments of the whole wild event.

Despite this, the event was a joy, and I was thrilled to be a part of it. And I’m glad that I was on a team that was strong enough to see all of the puzzles — many teams were skipped past various puzzles, depending on their pace, so that everyone could meet at the grand finale at the same time. A reasonable idea — indeed, probably the only way to go about an event like this — but a bummer for the teams who missed out on, for example, the self-operating Ouija board.

All in all, I have enormous admiration for the event’s organizers — the staff of Miskatonic University. These behind-the-scenes photographs barely hint at the mind-boggling amount of work that went into this, all done for the love of the puzzles and the puzzle community. Heartfelt thanks to all of them, and best wishes for many, many hours of catch-up sleep.

When I was in high school and college, I was a rabid fan of Games magazine. Why? Because I loved turning the pages of a new issue, never sure what I was going to see next.

They had crossword puzzles in there, sure, but I usually ignored these. I was drawn to the more interesting puzzles: Grids where the words performed like acrobats in the circus, flipping around, going in circles, doing all kinds of unpredictable stunts.

I was a big fan of Will Shortz, Patrick Berry, Mike Shenk, Henry Hook, and many others who were not content to rely on the usual assortment of puzzle types. They wanted to give the puzzle-loving audience Something New, and boy, did they ever.

Here’s the thing, though: Those new and different variety puzzles? A lot of them were pretty damn tough. You had to be a devoted puzzle addict to want to tackle them.

There are a lot of people out there who say they like puzzles, but what they mean are easier, casual puzzles. They have no interest in trying to tackle, say, one of Mike Shenk’s Marching Bands, where words go absolutely every-freakin-where. I myself didn’t try a Marching Bands for many years. I was just too intimidated. And those dazzling three-star variety cryptics? Good heavens. Forget it. I knew I was probably missing something good, but I didn’t have a prayer of solving those puzzles.

But those variety puzzle types — the unusual and interesting puzzles that captivated me then and that I continue to adore now — don’t HAVE to be tough and intimidating. If you shrink them down a bit, and avoid obscure words in the grid’s fill — why, anybody can solve them, no matter their level of experience.

That’s what I’ve tried to do over the last few years, first under the name Puzzle Your Kids and then — when it became clear that adults also liked these puzzles — under the new name Puzzlesnacks.

Puzzlesnacks look a lot like those interesting puzzles I was drawn to back when I first started getting Games magazine. The words perform all kinds of stunts, and the puzzles will bend your brain in many new directions. But the puzzles are also much smaller — typically just 16-35 words, and with a vocabulary that pretty much anybody can tackle with confidence.

I’m imagining a door marked Love of Puzzles, you see, and I want to swing that door wide open, for kids and for adults who think the early-week newspaper crossword is the most interesting puzzle available to them.

I’ve been creating these puzzles for the last three years. And today the first full collection of Puzzlesnacks is officially available: 110 puzzles covering nearly 40 different puzzle types. You can find Puzzlesnacks at your favorite bookstore (I hope, anyway), or online at the usual places.

If you buy it, and enjoy it, give it a review on Amazon or Goodreads or your bookstore Web site of choice, wouldja? You wouldn’t believe how big a difference a few good, honest reviews make.

Thanks.

Eric recently ran a “farm-to-table” puzzle event for the Stepping Stones Children’s Museum in Norwalk, CT. Read about it here.

Getting my new book, Puzzlesnacks, for free could be as easy as pushing a button! Head on over to Goodreads and enter the drawing by July 30 for your chance to win one of two free copies.