I feel like my recent blogs have really been about summarizing weeks – I hope to shift that and start writing more content, but this week has definitely been an exciting time. The layout for Roving Pack was finished and sent to the printer. Actually placing the order for my print proofs of the novel was just about the most surreal feeling I could imagine. I’m admittedly a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to books and publishing and so for me there’s something about a physical printed copy of my words bound together that is really what makes something real for me so needless to say I am eagerly eagerly waiting for the postal service to deliver the proofs for me!
This week hasn’t all been layout approval and proofs though, first thing Monday morning I was also able to unveil some really exciting news that I’ve been keeping a secret for a little while – I was able to unveil the new Roving Pack website which like Kicked Out’s site will be the home for most of the Roving Pack specific news – (though I will continue to x-post things to my own site as well.) As part of the new site I was also able to start the Pre-Ordering for the novel!
If ordering print proofs of Roving Pack didn’t make this book feel real to me, then watching orders begin to come in sure did! I hadn’t known exactly what to expect with the pre-ordering – it wasn’t something that my publisher and I did with Kicked Out but I knew it was definitely something that I wanted to do with the novel. I’d been planning to have the pre-ordering option but honestly I didn’t really think that many folks would do it! This week as the orders have begun to flow in from all across the country and around the world! Folks who pre-order will be get the novel signed/dedicated and delivered to their house before other folks are able to purchase and will receive some one-inch buttons handmade with my old zinester button maker based on the cover art that KD Diamond created! It’s been really humbling to watch the orders come in and to hear people in the community talk to me about how excited they are about the novel. It’s been especially overwhelming in the very best of ways to have people pre-ordering the novel to donate to LGBTQ student and youth programs!
Then, this morning I got a surprise message from the amazing Anna Joy Springer who wrote The Vicious Red Relic, Love an intensely incredible book that released last year, and she BLURBED ROVING PACK!!!!!!!! Check out what she thought of the novel!
“An outsider among outsiders, Roving Pack’s deeply innocent and delightfully freaky narrator Click discovers that the expansive wisdom of heart beats the narrow logic of the pack. Lowrey’s novel champions a risky queerness that resists commodification.”
Anna Joy Springer author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love