Damn, it feels good to be writing again.

The words started flowing again this morning, for a pivotal action scene near the beginning of Drawing Dead. The third book has its opening gambit take place in Antarctica (yes, seriously!), and the action is as hot as the weather is cold. At least it will be if I write it well. Feels good to be crafting stories again.

These last few months I’ve been working so hard at everything BUT writing, trying to market and publicize my book and do all the little things they don’t teach you in English class. It’s a lot of behind-the-scenes scraping and hustling, often with no idea if any of it will even work, and some days it feels like shouting in the wilderness. But today was not one of those days!

I tuned into my favorite poker/pop-culture podcast, “Poker In the Ears,” and heard the official announcement of something co-host Joe Stapleton had already told me by email. “Blood Game” has been chosen for a “poker book club.” Basically, I’ll be invited to record part of one of their shows, probably in April. Fans of the show (and there are MANY) are being encouraged to read the book over the next two months, to come up with questions to be asked of me on that show.

I wonder what their audience will think. Maybe they’ll like my book, and maybe they won’t. Some of both probably. No work of art is for everyone.

These are primarily poker fans, and I think they’ll like the detail I put into strategic decisions. “Blood Game” is also, as far as I’m aware, the only work of popular fiction that talks about hand ranges or the fact that PLO exists. But I took some of that out in places where it was maybe too much, and hurt the pacing. Maybe I’ll put some alternate versions of chapters on my website someday, so the poker aficionados can read more of the stuff they like.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is beyond cool! And I really appreciate the opportunity to get my voice out to the masses. I think that’s all any upstart writer can hope for. A chance to be heard.

Part of what makes the traditional publishing process so hard is you go into it knowing that most agents aren’t even going to read your sample pages, and editors won’t even talk to you without an agent. Just getting people to give you a chance is a massive hurdle. So many of us just give up. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the fact I don’t know how.

Maybe someday I’ll be in a position to give fellow writers a boost. For now, it’s my time to appreciate being on the receiving end.

(Check out “Poker In the Ears” wherever you find podcasts. In this post, I refer to a four-minute block early on in Episode 328)