Oh baby

It's been a bad weekend, begun with bad news from home conveyed badly (note to family: I'm five hours ahead and there is literally nothing I want to find out about over social media first), and concluded with grief bacon and grief drafting. But now that it's Monday and, as far as I know, everyone important has been told, I can say what's happening with my irradiated baby.

After a lot of back and forth and more transatlantic phone calls than I care to think about, my work has a publisher in the UK, US, and Canada, which shocked me a bit as I'd been told to consider myself very lucky if I landed one in any one country. Here in the UK I get to work with William Heinemann, which feels a bit weird, since I've walked past the Random House building on my way to Tate Britain so many times and never imagined that I'd be invited inside. In the US I belong to Hogarth, which is an imprint of Random House US but was (apparently) begun by Virginia Woolf and has died and been resurrected since then - a fact that I still squee over whenever I think about it. In Canada it's being published by Bond Street, Doubleday. At some point in the next few weeks I get to wander down to London to meet everyone at Heinemann, and a few weeks after that I should start getting revision notes. And I still feel like someone should come along and take me back to the finger-painting so the adults can get their work done.

The current working title is "The Shore," but I'm hoping that someone in editorial will come up with the kind of title that sticks in your head for the rest of your life - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Gravity's Rainbow, 100 Years of Solitude; different ones probably do it for you. My sixteen-year-old sister summarizes it as being about sex, drugs, and wild ponies, and while those things occur where necessary, she left out the murder, plotting, and reconciliation that also happens. It's scheduled for release in 2015 in all three countries, though probably at different times, and though it's been fully drafted for about a year now I'm looking forward to the massive amounts of editorial that will happen between now and then. My advisor and I called it my multi-limbed, multi-headed, irradiated demon baby, and while it's looking a lot more like a novel and a lot less like a random collection of violent events, it could still stand to be poked more into a traditional baby shape.

After a skim of all of their books, it looks like there's about a 5% chance of getting a "Chick Lit" cover. Which is about as important as having an ugly baby, I guess. Or maybe more important, since a lot of women and most men tend to avoid Chick Lit, and my book is pretty certain to disappoint anyone looking for the sort of lighthearted story you usually get under a pink cover with glittery writing and a single graphic image - a martini glass, a high heel, a tube of lipstick, you know the drill. So great publishers, great editors, and a shot at a cover that I won't be embarrassed of.

Now if only I could convince my parents that they really don't want to read it.