Galleys!!

.
Five of these showed up in the mail (well, UPS) yesterday:



Boy... there are some pretty big moments for a writer, getting started, and this is definitely one of them. The first time you can actually pick up a copy of your book and flip through it. It's even got that ink smell that's somehow unique to the publishing industry, and hasn't changed by a molecule in probably a century or more. (I can personally only date it back to the first Dean Koontz and Stephen King paperbacks I read in the eighties.)

This feels surreal. And very cool.