As any writer will tell you, there is nothing like seeing the words you've written bound in book form for the first time!

This advance copy of my novel, Alias Hook, arrived last week from my publisher, Snowbooks, in the UK. It's only an uncorrected proof, which means it does not reflect the two weeks last November that my editor and I spent painstakingly fixing typos, restoring scene breaks and cleaning up the punctuation.

But who cares? It's a book!

I'm told this moment is analogous to holding your firstborn in your arms for the very first time. Except, in my case, the labor took close to nine years, not months. And I do mean labor, not gestation: the minute your brain becomes pregnant with that one, fertile Idea, that's when the work begins!

For midwives, I had a couple of New York agents who subsequently fell by the wayside, and two terrific women, my editor and publisher at Snowbooks, who "fell in love with" my little book.

Of course, to paraphrase Neil Gaiman in his great commencement address last May, I am hourly expecting the Fraud Police to show up and tell me it's all been a terrible mistake, and that it's time to go quetly and get a real job.

But until that happens—it's a book!

(It even has its own Facebook page, so it MUST be real!)