1: The book deal & other madness
Hey, hi, hello—
*trips into a face plant, and completely fucking eats it*
Yikes. Sorry for the cringe; however…
You’re very likely reading this because you’ve already seen the announcement that my debut novel is being published by Bindery Books & Ezeekat Press in 2026!!
asdhdjfkjwnxhxh (← i am excited)
Yes, I have been losing my mind since I first got the news—thanks for asking.
But how did we get here? And why do I still feel like it isn't real, despite the fact that things have been signed and sealed and wrapped in a bow?
Come closer and let me tell you a secret: *whispers in your ear* I’d kinda given up hope on getting this book published as my debut.
At the beginning of 2024, I shifted gears to work on a new book, because I can only mentally focus 100% on one project at a time.
Then I saw Bindery's Pitchfest.
At the time, I thought 'what the hell, why not' and submitted. After reading some advice about handling rejections, I’d been trying not to automatically self reject, even though I believed I would be rejected. Plus I had a goal to receive 100 rejections on this book as a morbid milestone.
Guess that worked out for me, huh...
Now for a quick-ish history of Black as Diamond.
I've been writing BAD (heh, my book is BAD, get it? I'm hilarious please laugh) since 2016. Aside from a failed webcomic that got 10 updates, this was my first big & serious writing project.
From 2017 to 2019, I wrote ~30 chapters, and finished BAD in the summer of 2020 thanks to all that wonderful free time (which sucked, but at least I was locked in). It was almost 200k words.
Yikes.
Thankfully revisions took version 2 down to a more “reasonable” word count, which is when I started querying agents. Horrible idea. The delusion really jumped out.
For about 2 years I was actively querying and revising BAD. After 2 rounds that resulted in many rejections, as expected, I started pulling away to lay my attention at the feet of other projects. At that point, I queried whomever and wherever was open, according to their guidelines. I’d even started researching self-publishing because I have this weird need to put nearly every finished thing I make some-fucking-where. It’s chronic, truly.
But this ‘might as well submit’ attitude is how BAD ended up at Bindery Books. That’s pretty neat, I think.
So I actually submitted BAD to the Pitchfest twice, both times after someone in a writing server posted the links: March & July.
The first time, I kind of... forgot? That I submitted it there? (╥﹏╥) that sounds bad! But I swear it's only because my anxiety hates rejection, and is only managed by distancing myself from the work to convince myself I don't care as much as I really do.
The second time, I was extremely swamped with the ever eternal job search™ and game writing. As a result, I just couldn't focus on the status of the submission, too enraptured by my newest fixation at the time (I like making games, who knew).
In fact, I had actually written a new outline for version 4 of BAD as I assumed my submissions would be going nowhere. I was feeling pumped to get back into drafting for the new semester.
Now, imagine my surprise when on pretty much the last day of August I get an email.
An email in my inbox.
An email in my inbox with ‘Offer’ in the title.
I damn near thought it was spam. Legitimately, I couldn't open it on the day I received it because my nerves where doing that annoying thing where they made me want to crawl out of my skin and cry. I screamed (silently), went to bed (anxiously), and opened that bad boy the next day while trying not to freak the fuck out (← challenge failed).
Everything’s been a whirlwind since then.
Getting the offer, meeting with everyone, getting my edits, doing the edits (💀), the announcement (!!!), all while trying not to explode from the secrecy.
It's a dream come true. It's also sheer weird luck—and opportunity. The opportunity Bindery gives to unagented authors to get their foot in the door by getting our books before the eyes of readers.
I’m insanely grateful, like I can’t even put into words how grateful, that Jaysen, Bindery, and Emily are taking a chance on me and my self-indulgent gush of a book. If you could put me & all my interests into an olive press, this novel would probably be the result.
The five-year plan I thought my life would be following kinda got accelerated by this, but I wouldn’t say this is an unwelcome wrench in those works. Frankly, it’s quite a welcome one. All the wrenches, more like this please.
Thank you for reading this rambly, disjointed mess of a blog post. I have class right now, but later I’m gonna lie down and cry about the fact this is for real for real actually happening.
Oh, and here’s some bonus art of the other two main characters, before I go!
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