Lips Touch! Now a real book!

Here it is! A real book! Within a space of little more than a week, Jim's and my three eagerly awaited *collaborations* have arrived at our home. One by stork delivery, two by UPS :-) This is a good month!

It's so exciting to see the genuine Lips Touch because the ARC doesn't really prepare you for the beauty of the actual book. Jim's illustrations are gorgeous, and the designer, Chris Stengel, did a phenomenal job making this book look like a GIFT. We were thrilled when Scholastic green-lit the two-color printing, so the art would have more nuance and hue. And it's not just the art. The details! Look at the frontispiece:
Juicy redness. And here:
Isn't it lovely? The page numbers are in red, and the chapter titles, and each chapter begins with a beautiful elaborate capital letter in lurvely red. I want so badly to post art photos RIGHT NOW, but I'm still waiting for the okay. Hopefully that will come soon, and I'll put up some art later this morning. Can't imagine why it wouldn't be okay to show it now, at long last, but we'll see.

Anyway, yayayayayay! Lips Touch is an actual book, and a gorgeous one! Funny to think back to those early Sunday Scribblings when I was just beginning to write some short stories for fun, with no expectation that they'd ever see the printed page, and now here they are! Remember, release date is October 1, and it's available for pre-order HERE (Amazon) and HERE (Powell's), or you can ask your local independent or your library to order it. You know, if you don't mind :-)

Book events:
I'll be doing a book talk/signing at Powell's Books (the Hawthorne location) on Monday, October 5 (7:30 pm) and I'll be reading/speaking at the Wordstock Festival, here in Portland, on Saturday October 10 (3 pm) -- both events will feature Silksinger too. I love my children equally :-) (Well, okay, I love Clementine more.)