It’s interesting to sell a book, because as soon as you do, you feel this incredibly rush of accomplishment, and then there’s a lull before you get your edits and really dive in to the process of producing & promoting it (revising, seeing cover options,writing essays, giving interviews, etc., etc., etc.) when it’s really easy to forget you actually did anything, or that the book really exists. I’ve been having this weird feeling that my new novel is almost less real now than when it was on submission, because at least then I was focused every day on who would buy it, whether it would be seen. But now it’s out of my hands, for a little while, and not yet in public ones.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who’s published a book (including me) knows this is actually a period of incredible luxury, because you get to go back to being a writer in the purest sense for a month or so: just writing. Something private, something new. Being a hermit, before the currently-written-but-invisible book makes its way into the world, and you have to move through the excitement and incredible anxiety and beauty and terror of actually publishing something. This is an interlude, a gift. But it still feels weird.

There is such a thing as Good Weird, I guess.

Anyway, all this is to say that I’m going out of town this weekend to use up some of my remaining Pre-Book Time visiting one of my very best friends, and as a result there probably won’t be a new comic next week, so you better enjoy this one. (I do, god knows!)

After that, I’ll be back. Ready to step into what comes next.