Mumble Herder

So, I'm good to announce that Superpowers is going to be published in the UK by Vintage Originals. Check out those covers! Gorgeous stuff. I'm going to be working with Beth Coates, who has great taste, obviously. W00t! Thanks to Beth, to Shana, and to our UK agent consult Will Francis, who gave the book my favorite tag description yet: "Superpowers is the weirdest, saddest, funniest, bleakest coming of age novel I've read in a long time."

As an aside, I must note that it's been slightly odd to have everyone involved with the book refer to it as a "coming-of-age" story, since I wasn't thinking of it like that as I was writing it. I was pretty much thinking it was just a story, about people, who did stuff. Not that I have a problem with the description, at all. It's just strange how perspectives differ.

So, I've checked with all concerned about whether it's OK to go ahead and announce this, and even though I'm afraid that talking about it out loud like this will just make the whole thing evaporate, I can't contain myself anymore.

I sold a book.

Yes. Thanks to the efforts of superagent Shana, Superpowers will be appearing as a trade paperback sometime in or around the Spring of 2008. The deal is with Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Crown, which is a division of Random House. (I think I've got that right.) I'm going to be working with Jason Pinter, who's a writer himself (his debut crime novel will be out next year), and who sounds really excited to be working on the book.

What is the book? Well, here's the description that went out on Publishers Marketplace:

David J. Schwartz's SUPERPOWERS, dubbed "The Incredibles" meets THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, in which after a night of heavy drinking, five friends wake up to discover they have superhuman abilities, but lacking super-villains they find that the ramifications of their new powers are more complicated than they anticipated, to Jason Pinter at Three Rivers Press, by Shana Cohen at the Stuart Krichevsky Agency (NA).

That's more or less the book, all right, at least the capsule description.

They're paying me, too; and they're paying me well, particularly for a first novel. It's more than I've ever made in a year, in fact aside from a couple of my years bartending it's easily twice what I've made in any given year. (Keep in mind that I've never made a whole lot. Still, this is very nice.) To me this says they believe in the book, that they believe it can be a big seller. I plan to prove them right.

It hasn't really sunk in yet, not completely. But I've been in a transitional stage for a while now, since finishing my Master's, and this will give me some freedom to make the decisions I need to make. And now I can call myself a novelist without feeling like I'm not being entirely honest. Holy shit.