coming to a website near you...

Now we've come to the update portion of our program.

First off, I may have been worried for nothing. Well, no, that's not true. It's just that nothing is as bad as I thought. This is one of the side effects of living with a pessimist. What am I babbling about?

My book is going to be published!

I feel lucky right now. Someone said to me it's due to hard work (and she's right), but I feel like if I wasn't in the right place and time or if I'd finished school or done half a dozen other things differently, this story wouldn't have been written, submitted to this publisher, read by this editor and I wouldn't have been offered a contract. What's especially scary is that the editor left me a voicemail I didn't get until a week later; I was scared she might have changed her mind by the time I called her back. :-p Instead, she tells me she loves my book and I spent an entire double shift at work grinning like an idiot.

Now I'm just waiting on a contract, copy edits, a cover and release date. Never thought I'd type that sentence, not this soon. I feel weird about it. I expected at least one rejection. Not that I'm saying my writing's bad, but almost like the entire journey should've been a little bit harder and having my first submitted novel published feels like I'm jumping ahead in line. Of course, I've been writing since I was six and doing it seriously since 2001, so maybe I'm just feeling weird because it's finally happening.

And soon I'll be able to scratch something else off my two year To Do List. The first thing I scratched off was "submit to a publisher," the second will be "get published." I know, complicated, right? The third should be "get my website up and running." I found a server the other day. Now I just have to get my pennies together (the laptop will wait again) and pay for five years of hosting in advance. Plus, I should probably have some content. A video of me dancing in front of my camera while I reenact finding out I'm going to be published probably shouldn't be the only thing there. ;-) Anyone got ideas?