Hello! I am happy to to announce that my first short story collection, The Portable Son, has been acquired by Aqueous Books, a wonderful new independent press brought to you by the same great people who run Prick of the Spindle. It will be published in the fall of 2011 both as a paperback and as a Kindle eBook. It’s difficult to write this blog post without sounding like a total spaz; I’m so excited I could spit.

The book is a collection of nine linked stories, all following a single character, Peter, from his Mississippi adolescence to his conflicted adulthood bouncing around the South, trying to figure out how to be a grown-up, which, if you read this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is not merely a random authorial confabulation of upper-middle-class ennui, but is in fact an actual verifiable trend. (Ah, if we only had that “emerging adulthood” line back when we were twenty-four and sleeping in our childhood bunkbed. Back then they just called us Slackers.)

Anyway, three of the stories — “High Cotton,” “Timber Walking,” and “Nightswimming” — have already been published in print and online mags, and two more of the stories got picked up over the summer and will appear within the next several months.

So, in short, lots of excitement, and I am sure to actually begin posting something to this blog as my inevitable PR campaign of total devastation cranks its engine.

And I love that word — “forthcoming.” Good, good word.