I HAVE A PUBLISHING CONTRACT!!!

I'm sorry, did I just yell that??

I think, a week and a half after the formal offer, it is finally sinking in. Today I signed the papers, and it feels real. After walking through a daze, wondering, "How in the world can this be happening?" it finally is.

I have a contract with a publisher who wants to publish my book, Some Kind of Normal.

I suppose it's typical of my life that it didn't happen the normal way. Typical of the book, really. It happened, as I suspect many things in this industry do, by a lot of hard work, but a good deal of luck as well. Or networking. Maybe some of both.

The short story is this: I met a guy on Twitter who had an editor. He asked me to join a writing forum with him, where I wrote my query pitch. His editor saw it and asked him to have me submit to them. I did. They offered. I accepted.

The long story is much more...well...longer. And probably confusing. And I'm sure I'll get around to telling it here one day. But for now, suffice it to say, I'm not knocking Twitter anymore. :)

The publisher is a small press named NorLights Press. They are new and growing, and the more I talk to them, the more excited I become.

I've done a lot of research lately about small presses, which I'm sure over the next weeks I'll fill you in on more. I've read the warnings and the praise, weighed the two along with my own experiences in the past eight months and those of my fellow writers, and come to the conclusion that this is exactly where I need to be.

The next weeks will be a flurry of editing, collaborating on cover design, marketing research, choosing where I want the press releases sent. While NorLights takes on all of the financial responsibilities and normal publishing duties, since they are a small press, it becomes even more important for me to help market myself and the book in places they might not be able to reach. It's an aspect of the process I'm eager to jump into.

I love this whole life! I love every aspect of writing! I love writing, revising, editing, marketing. I even loved the query process, most of the time. While I didn't get an agent out of it, it was, on the whole, very good to me. Without so many agents writing such encouraging, personal letters, I might have given up long ago.

So there it is.

The journey begins.

As soon as I get myself off cloud nine. :)