So one of the aspects of getting a book published with a small press is that you don't have a huge marketing department to do your promotional work and production work for you. So you get to do some advertising copy-writing, which in a way is a good thing, because if you get it wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.

I wrote the little synopsis that you see on the inside flap of the book's dust jacket for Heart's Revenge, and I quite like how it turned out. For the back copy, I just used a short excerpt from the book, one of my favorite scenes (Mitch and Ella meeting Blackbeard's ghost for the first time).

Anyhoo, this past week I put together the following synopsis that will probably be on the flap of The Wannoshay Cycle, and just for kicks thought I'd post it here:

Like scattered pieces of a black puzzle, the alien ships crash-land onto the frozen turf of the American Midwest and southern Canada in the middle of a blizzard.

Our world and its people will never be the same.

Initially feared by an already terrorized population, the aliens aboard those ships come to be known as the Wannoshay. They begin a slow, painful integration into human society, aided by a Catholic priest named Father Joshua, who has become fascinated by them and their mysterious ways. The transition is fatally interrupted when a series of mysterious explosions occur, and the "Wantas" are blamed. The aliens are placed into internment camps, "for their protection and our own."

An unlikely group of humans led by Father Joshua try to piece together what really caused those explosions. This crew includes a drug-addicted young woman from Winnipeg named Ally Trang , a single mother from Milwaukee named Shontera, an insecure day laborer named Tim "Skin" Blair from Nebraska, and an elderly Native American man named Shermie who is convinced he can speak the Wanta's language.

Together they converge around the alien Mother Ship in snowy Iowa City, where the Wannoshay are suffering from what they call "soul curdling." The aliens are dying, and their sickness appears to be spreading to humans.

The humans soon discover the "true history" of the Wannoshay, a secret that explains the aliens' epidemic sickness and forces the humans to make painful choices about the best way to help these new immigrants to our world, choices that could take them away from their own people and the lives they once knew.

The Wannoshay Cycle is a moving, heart-wrenching story of the future that resonates with the dark events of our present.

Okay, don't laugh at that last paragraph. Just trying to do some spin, okay!?!

And let me tell you, it's hard as hell to condense a 400+ page book into 300 words or less.

All of this book talk reminds me of a cool realization I had this past week (one of many, really). I was glancing at our "Harry Potter" closet that sits under the steps leading upstairs, and I saw the extra three or four copies of my story collection and the romance novel, and it struck me then: Not a lot of people can say that they've written a book and gotten it published.

One of those "Duh!" moments, I guess. But I've never really stopped to think about that. Pretty cool. I can get by for months one a nice thought like that. Later!