I've signed with Sandpiper Publicity. The campaign planned for me is extremely comprehensive. I'm not sure how much is proprietary information, so I won't say anything about it. But boy, it sounds FUN.

What I will say is that the president of the company did something unheard of in the publicity industry before he agreed to represent me: He read my book.

He also said something extremely complementary that I won't repeat because I don't have his permission, but it does a writer a lot of good to be told by professionals that your work is not a joke. My previous publicist fell into the trap that has claimed so many in the entertainment industry. He tried to outsource all the work to me. Well, I'm not a publicist. That's why I hired him. What too many publishers and publicists do is expect the writers to promote the book, but you can't when you're a nobody. My new publicist told me that a friend of his comes to work every morning and finds a thousand e-mails in his in-box. It's simply not possible to go through them all. Having me pitch myself to media outlets would've been a gigantic waste of time. So I found a publicist who did his homework by actually reading my book. He even referenced parts of it to me.

When I was a kid, I had my IQ tested. It came in at 86, which is low-average. But even I know that having unknown writers try to promote their books themselves is absurd. This demented outsourcing and budget cutting is what's wrecking the publishing industry. CreateSpace--which will publish the two companion volumes to Ghosts and Ballyhoo--is putting out thousands of titles. People still want to read. But if a struggling writer can't afford to have a book professionally proofread and then can't afford to hire a publicity firm, the book will either be rejected or it'll die. I'm spending tons of money on marketing this book. But the returns--down the road--will make my investment worth it. I think. I'm a tortoise, not a hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Hopefully.

Tim told me that Frank Sinatra's label Reprise used to sign artists because they figured the person would be a huge success in five years. I've been working at this seriously for only two. But even if after three more years I'm still not a successful writer, who cares? Not me.

Oh, and Schiffer also has a newly revamped Website. It looks great. (Nobody told me they'd redone their site, so the link on my Website went dead. We fixed it today.)

Are things looking up? I think so. It's been a long, hard, discouraging slog getting to this point, but as I've said before, the most important thing about my life is that I've finally become the person I always wanted to be. For the most part. I've still got massive issues, but I expect to resolve them over the next forty-seven million lifetimes.

If the campaign goes well and the book is a success, I'll owe it all to the many, many people who insisted that I write Ghosts and Ballyhoo and who then flooded me with extremely kind messages about it.

Thank you all. I honestly couldn't have done it without you.