December 29, 2009

Wow. So. Yeah. My first novel is out in stores today.

It's a fantasy entitled Spellbent, and if you fancy a peek at the cover, it's on my homenode. It's published by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, and at present is available in mass market paperback and as an ebook. The plan as I understand it is that if the book does well enough sales-wise, they'll release it in hardcover sometime down the road. This is what Del Rey did with Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which has done pretty darned well.

This is a milestone for me personally -- I've wanted to be a novelist pretty much since I first learned to read. Writing and publishing has been a lot more complicated than I ever would have guessed as a seven-year-old reading A Wrinkle In Time, and every day I'm learning something new because there's always something new to be learned.

On a related note, in two weeks I'll start working as a mentor in Seton Hill University's MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. It's the only MFA program in the whole world that focuses exclusively on genre writing (mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) and I'm geeked to be a part of it. I know some of the other mentors and they're a fun, knowledgeable group of authors and educators.

I still have your book. Yeah, the one by Albert Camus. Thaaats right, the stained & torn one! See? Now you remember. Do you remember the day you lent it to me? Did you read the one I borrowed you? You know, The Misogynist's Guide.

I wonder what's going to happen. Sometimes I fantasize about what could have been, if I hadn't been such a coward. If I wouldn't have stepped back and listened to what my gut was telling :"No, don't hide away! Screw what the others are thinking! They only understand what they see..."

But it's too late now. Too late for explanations. For excuses, for fiery eyes, for my presence there. Too late for disclaimers and conversations. You probably don't even care about what happens anymore. I'm not sure whether I'm going to make it inside your cognizance as the person who was really different from all of us & tried to open our eyes upon real matters of Life...

It's no use struggling to say

"I'm sorry, but I, too, have my own part of guilt, as well as you do. I know I ran away without ever coming back with a logical explanation, but I had to.
I wish I could have come to your bar's closing party. I wish I could grab your face right now, look you in the eyes, so that you'd know I wasn't lying. I wish I would say something funny and your eyes would smile back at me, so I'd know your lips would gladly forgive mine..."

Just as I was hard-linking something, I noticed the time of submission...So ironic! 'Tis said that if one looks at this kind of times at a watch, he/she is loved by someone. Gibberish! These days I checked my wristwatch only at times like these...

Today something happened to me that I thought only happened in urban myths.

I was nonchalantly checking my inbox and I found I had a message from an old university friend from my first year. We'll call her Heidi because that's almost her name. Oh aye, I wonder what she's got to say. So I click it and I find myself confronted by a farrago of pictures of her in increasing states of undress.

Once I'd surreptitiously saved them to my hard disk for future reference, I read the body of the mail. Turns out that she wanted to send these to the boy friend and accidentally clicked "Send to All" and we all got an eyeful of her undercarriage.

Whoops.

I think I'd best be very careful when I go oot on the tap on New Year's Eve in case I pull and find myself minus a kidney.