If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of “The Elements of Style.” The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. —Dorothy Parker

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Writing can be an arduous task, one designed to cause grief. Hours on your butt in front of the blank page, writing words that may or may not be read by anyone else. When you finally do decide to show the world your work, you face rejection after rejection after rejection. Until…

For years I have been mentally writing this post. I dreamed about how I would say it. I thought of clever ways and obnoxious ways and snotty ways and humble ways. But now that the time has come that I can actually write this blog post, I’m oddly at a loss as to how to say this.

So how shall I write this? I suppose straight-forward is the best way to do this:

My novel is going to be published. NAL, which is a division of Penguin Random House, will be publishing Modern Girls in the spring of 2016.

This all sounds very understated, doesn’t it? Let me say it again. My. Novel. Is. Going. To. Be. Published.

You need to know that I have been floating since I got the news a couple of weeks ago (and why the delay in blogging it? Hard to say. I guess it simply didn’t feel real at first). There’s been much giddiness and happiness and, frankly, a lot of research because I still have some serious revising to do. The process to get to this point was intense, and I will tell about it in a little more detail in future posts, but for now, I am simply being happy.

This is me, happy. I’m sure the stress and the pressure and the anxiety will all kick back in soon, but for the next day or so, I’m going to continue enjoying it all.

And then, back to the writing. Always back to the writing.