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.