I Go Away for One Weekend and Suddenly There's a Release Date, Jacket Copy and...an ARC!

This weekend, I went away for a short beach trip with 13 of my very favorite people. It was glorious fun and I did NOT bring my laptop. Just my iPhone.

About an hour after we arrived, I noticed that one of my fellow Class of 2K12ers had emailed to say that the Bloomsbury/Walker Winter 2012 catalog was online. And guess what it included?

My book. With jacket copy. And a release date!!

The first thing I wanted to do was blog about it, but I came to my senses eventually: by which I mean that I realized enjoying the gorgeous beach trumped spending hours trying to compose a post on my iPhone.

But now I'm home. And though I'm very sad that my short vacation is over, I'm very happy to be able to share the following.

My jacket copy!

The Goonies meets Holes when a simple summer outing turns into a wild adventure!

Goldenrod Moram loves nothing better than a good quest. Intrepid, curious, and full of a well-honed sense of adventure, she decides to start her own exploring team fashioned after her idols, the explorers Lewis and Clark, and to map the forest right behind her home. This task is complicated, however, by a series of unique events—a chance encounter with a mysterious old lady has her searching for a legendary blue rose. Another encounter lands her in the middle of a ragtag gang of brilliant troublemakers. And when she stumbles upon none other than the ghost of Meriwether Lewis himself, Goldenrod knows this will be anything but an ordinary summer . . . or an ordinary quest. Debut author Sarvenaz Tash combines an edge-of-your-seat adventure, a uniquely clever voice, and an unforgettable cast of characters to prove that sometimes the best adventures of all are waiting right in your own backyard.

The Goonies meets Holes?! For real? I honestly got a little teary when I read that for the first time.

I love the rest of my editor's copy, too. It almost makes me want to read the book. And, trust me, I may be at the point where it'll be somewhere between 8-10 years before I ever want to read this book again.

But wait, there's more! I also got my release date. READY?!

The Mapmaker and the Ghost will be hitting bookstores on:

4/24/2012

Oh, how I love the perfect symmetry of that date. Like how each of its numbers is divisible by four. How the first three digits (424) were the first three digits of my home phone number growing up. How I was born on the 24th and April 24th just happens to be my half-birthday. Um, yeah. So, I'm a bit of a math geek (shocking, I know) and I like patterns.

And, finally, when I arrived home, it wasn't to a UPS slip like I suspected. But to an honest-to-god package. Which held...

THIS:

 Oh. That is an ARC. Otherwise known as a galley. Otherwise known as a REAL BOOK.

You know what you can do with a real book? You can read it!

A Dramatization

You can put it on a shelf next to other REAL BOOKS.

You can stare at the spine where it says things like your name and your awesome release date.

Which may have compelled me to create a little countdown widget like so:

So, um, you know. It's pretty cool. If you're into that sort of thing.