Congratulations, Cassandra Pearson! Cassandra has won her name in The Return Man!

Thank you deeply to everyone who entered — it was so much fun reading your entries. When I have a little more time, I’ll post a bunch (without any personal details) here on the site, so we can all have some fun seeing each other’s ideas. In total, there were 165 entries.

The winner was chosen at random. Rest assured, this did not involve throwing darts at a dartboard, any verses of “eenie meenie minie mo,” or smearing every winner’s name with peanut butter and seeing which one my dog licked. Instead, the following “double random” methodology was used:

1. Using the generators at Random.org, the list of entries was fed into a list randomizer and each entry received a random number from 1 to 165 (the total number of entries).

2. A random number generator then spit out another random number from 1 to 165.

3. The entry that matched the chosen random number won. In this case, Cassandra Pearson!

For anyone especially curious, the winning random number was the number 23 — which, if you’ve seen the Jim Carrey movie of the same name, should make us all very, very afraid.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for your support as The Return Man draws closer to bookstores!

— Vincent