I’m bad at self promotion; it takes time and some tiny semblance of effort. Time is an issue because if time were water, I’d be death valley. As for tiny bits of effort, well. I’m lazy.

But, it’s definitely not because I don’t like promoting things that are going on, because what’s going on is pretty darn cool! So cool that I keep wanting to wax poetic about it––and given how many people have approached me with questions about what’s happening in my nascent writing career, and I keep pointing them to the blog, and they keep coming back with the exact same questions, I’m realizing that not only do I suck at self promotion I also suck at disseminating information.

I hope you’re ready for a veritable wikipedia of what Michael is Up To.

As mentioned earlier AdriAnne and I have written a book. We have written this book together, because AdriAnne is crazy and willing to do such things and I thought it would be wicked amazing. It is.

The book is a young adult space opera, which means absolutely nothing to many of you, so do this instead: Imagine Star Wars, Firefly, some Deadliest Catch, and of course romance, humor, sword fighting, and spectacular things you’ve never seen before. It’s young adult because largely the folks in it are pretty young, and grapple with things like – do my parents respect me? And should I save the universe? You know, the typical coming of age stuff.

We have an amazing agent, by the name of Kirsten Carleton, who is amazing. It’s easy to say that because, you know, obligation and all that but seriously – I have no idea what agents are like for other people but it  literally feels as though we have our own negotiating ninja out there in the wilds, hacking out contracts and various deals, while pretending by day to be a mild mannered yet brilliant editor.

And speaking of editors, we have one of those too! One who, without a doubt, is twitching at the sight of run on sentences, garbled thought processes, and the general mayhem of this so-called post. Kate Sullivan has been working with AdriAnne and me to get the manuscript ready for final publication, and that’s what we’ve been doing over the summer. That’s a process I’ll be writing about later, but I can promise you: anytime someone can make you laugh while reading their comments on your manuscript and realize just how you could do 100% better in a segment is worth their proverbial weight in metaphorical literary gold.

I am very sorry for the previous ‘sentence’.

It probably seems I’m being all gushalicious about this, but seriously, it’s exciting stuff because the darn thing is getting published next fall! And it’s awesome thanks to AdriAnne and Kirsten and Kate! There are conversations about covers! There are plans and events and things in the works, and if you stay tuned, if you like me on all the right pages, follow me in all the twitters, you, dear reader, will know all about it.

/self promotion of the day.