So, this happened...

A long, long time ago (maybe not too long ago…try fourteen years) in a world far, far away (okay, Vermont, not so far…) I took a bet: $25 if I could survive a year at a military university.

I won the bet.

I’ve never gotten my $25 (and, yes, I’m still bitter about that), but I took my adventures and wrote a little book about it. Because ever since third grade when I wrote that story about a dude ranch, a lighting strike, and love in the rain (a total rip-off of the old Nickelodeon show Hey, Dude), I’ve wanted to write stories that other people would read.

Agent Awesome, Mandy Hubbard, loved the book and helped nurture it into a thing of incredibleness (Yes, I can use made-up words: this is my blog.).

Then a few people in New York read it.

They loved it, too.

Then Mandy called. And I was all:

Somebody liked my book more than WE did and was interested in buying it. Then I had to be quiet. And remember to breathe. And also remember that Mandy is my agent, not someone I can cuss at over the phone and yell things like "SHUT THE FRONT DOOR" and nearly swerve off the road because I was driving when she called and I was too interested in the news to tell her I was driving...

And now, I can proudly scream my barbaric YAWP from the rooftops of the world.

Because I’m not at all melodramatic and, more importantly, because yesterday…THIS HAPPENED:

Debut author Joy N. Hensley’s THE PANDORA SOCIETY, in which a teen joins the first class of girls to attend the prestigious Denmark Military Academy, but when the brutal hazing starts, she discovers she’s the target of a centuries-old secret society, one that will stop at nothing to drive her out, forcing her to trust a boy she can never, ever fall for, in a two book deal, in a pre-empt, in a significant deal, to Jennifer Klonsky at Harper Teen, by Mandy Hubbard at D4EO Literary.

I’ll definitely have more details later, but I pretty much can’t string together many coherent thoughts and currently look like this: