Ladies and gentlemen, I have the best news ever. My novel, PANDORA, the namesake of this blog, is going to be published!

I’ve just signed a contract with Damnation Books for a September 1, 2012 release. I can hardly express my excitement. This will be my first published book.

Not the actual cover art.

PANDORA has been my baby for the past 5 years. When I was 18, in those liminal summer months between high school and college, I started thinking about the legend of Pandora’s box and how I might write a book involving Greek mythology. At that point, I had an amorphous idea for a novel that didn’t yet have a realized plot.

On the Fourth of July of 2007, I was sitting with my parents in a neighbor’s backyard. They lived on the edge of a manmade lake encircled by fancy houses, and every year these people set off fireworks over the lake. As I sat there on the damp grass, watching the fireworks up close and the flaming bits of cardboard falling around us, I was immediately struck by an idea. I suddenly knew the climax of my book.

I spent the rest of July outlining, and in August I sat down and wrote the prologue. For the next 2 years, I wrote on and off, almost giving up a couple of times when I became completely blocked halfway through the book. In the summer of 2009, right before I would go away to Spain to study abroad for a semester, I had the biggest burst of inspiration I have ever had in my life, and in about 2 months I wrote the last 40,000 words of the novel.

The first draft, as with most first drafts, was probably crap. I revised it. And I revised it again. I lost track of how many revisions it went through over the last 2.5 years. Now, at long last, it is going to be published.

I would like to thank you, my dear readers, for being so wonderful. Every day I check my blog stats and am elated by the amount of people viewing my posts. Writing means nothing if there’s no one to read it. I am so glad to be sharing this news with you, and I hope that when my book is available you might grab yourselves a copy. I’ll keep you all updated as I go through this process, and you, my lovely readers, will be the first to know of any events, giveaways, etc.