Major Announcement!

My novella, Ceremonials, has been accepted for publication by Kernpunkt Press. I'm so happy it hurts. Since the project is tangled up with copyrighted material, it might have a different name when it comes out, but it's the same project. The editor at Kernpunkt has told me she's very enthusiastic about the book, so I have high hopes that we'll work it out.

I found out about this on Friday. As a rule, I'm very, very bad at keeping secrets, but watching promised projects go boom after I made a big deal of them in the past, and particularly the last 18 months of pitching/trying/failing/waiting, has made me better at saying nothing until the news is more secure.

The book is due out in 2020. I have 784 ideas about how to promote it, including an LA bookstore tour, an email blast to everyone I've ever reviewed for, and hooking up with a unique book club to get it in tens of thousands of hands.

Because I can't resist making this news into advice: I started work on this project in 2013. That's six years ago. I finished it in early 2016, a span which includes some long breaks due to mental health; writing time was probably a few months, all told. I spent the following three years researching, querying, and submitting to presses. The project is extremely short to be a standalone book, so that limited the presses I could find who would even be interested, and it meant I could not go through an agent. (I tried one, and his email back indicated he saw the word count and didn't even read the rest of the query, which included info about the significant built-in audience.) Some of the presses who read it said it was beautiful but wrong for them. Others sent me form rejections.

It takes a long time, y'all.

Some of the reason is that my project is weird, short and lyrical, rather than a normal novel or memoir or whatever. But mostly it just takes a long time. My friend Marissa has a beautiful, finished, easily publishable memoir that she's been querying for I don't even remember how long now, two years maybe, and it's stupid and criminal that it took until last month for her to find an agent. It takes a long time. 

I have lesser news about other things, but I'm going to let this post stand alone. Can't wait to know more, and tell you more. I've wanted to hold in my hands a book I wrote since I was in elementary school, and I don't really believe it, but that's going to happen. Next year.