I am astonished that I actually just typed those words. Let’s type them again, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke:

I sold a book!

Here’s the hot-off-the-digital-presses Publisher’s Marketplace item:

Robin Talley’s debut LIES WE TELL OURSELVES, set in 1959 Virginia at the height of desegregation, in which two girls — one of the first black students in her town to attend a previously all-white school, and the white daughter of the town’s most vocal opponent of integration — are forced to work together and to confront not only their limited notions about race and politics, but also deeper truths about themselves, to T.S. Ferguson at Harlequin Teen, by Jim McCarthy at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (world English).

This book was by far the hardest I’ve ever attempted to write (I spent 3 months researching it before I wrote the first line!), and I was so happy just to have finished it that I still can’t quite believe it’s getting published on top of that. But it’s an amazing feeling to know it will actually become a real book! My new editor is T.S. Ferguson, who is awesome, and whom I can’t wait to work with to get the book into tip-top shape. And I’m thrilled to be at Harlequin Teen, which puts so much support behind its authors and turns out such fantastic (and beautifully designed!) YAs month after month. Lies We Tell Ourselves will come out in hardcover in spring 2014.

That feels far away right now, but it’s sooner than I ever imagined I’d have a book out. I’m going to be a debut author! Woo hoo!

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