A Surprise in the Mail

Friday afternoon as I left to pick Jo up from school, I got a package from editor Liz in the mail. The size and weight of it made me think it was another galley she'd been able to scrape up for me, but it was something far, far, better -

- an early copy of Something Rotten in hardcover! My official author copies won't come until the middle of October, when the book ships to bookstores, but Liz was able to grab one for me and send it early. It looks sweet! Click on either of the images to see it larger.

It's so very strange to finally hold the real book in your hand. For so long a novel is a collection of words on a computer screen, maybe a stack of manuscript pages every now and then. And for so long a novel is a mutable thing, changing on a monthly or weekly or sometimes daily basis as you and your editor make edits and fixes and additions. But when that book finally arrives in hardback, with the nice slick jacket and all the incidental information filled in and official, it really settles in. This is it. This is the novel. It's finished. It can't be rewritten anymore. It's one step from making its debut in the great wide world.

It's exciting and nerve-wracking, all at the same time. But way more exciting.