I've been working on Mister Mercury for almost a decade, which is a little excessive for a first novel, assuredly, but I felt it was worth it. It was a good story that needed a LOT of love for it to finally shine through. I have read countless articles and blog posts by smart, serious, bespectacled authors who each smugly attested that if you find yourself slaving away at your first novel for x number of years, then maybe it's because it's not working, and maybe it's time for you to let it go.

Well, Mister Mercury was not one of those novels. It wasn't a broken, immature concept that was clever on the surface and tiresome in execution (as those articles eloquently assured me it was). It was a good story, albeit a complicated one, one with many characters and many events and was maybe a little too ambitious for a first novel.

It was working. It just needed some oiling, and for a few of its parts to be taken out, spit-polished, and put back in places that wouldn't break everything when you turned it back on.

Giving up on it would have been, in a word, ridiculous. It was a story worth telling, and I was going to finish telling it, no matter how much work it needed.

Additionally, there are some people who have read it that would be very upset with me indeed if I just sat on it and kept it from the world.

Well, friends, we are on the cusp of its resurgence into the world. And we know so because it has arrived on two very large ebook markets for pre-order. Those markets are Apple iBooks (for various Apple devices) and the Barnes and Noble eBook maket (for Nooks). So you can actually purchase it early on if you so choose, and on January 15th, it will deliver right to your device, and will become available for the greater world to share and enjoy.

Now that we are a few short weeks away from its new release date, it is finally dawning on me that all those years of struggle will soon be behind me. I am no longer selfishly hoarding it from the world. It is finally complete enough and polished enough that I actually want the world to see it. I didn't feel that way the first time it was released (not completely, anyway), but I do feel that way now.

Mostly, I'm excited that when this is finally out there, I will allow myself to work on something else. Like that story about a grown woman who hits things with a stick.