We’re ready to roll, people.

Swarm is now up on the Brindle & Glass website and Amazon. It’s all set to launch in mid-September and can be pre-ordered online. Or, better still, support your local indie bookstore (Lord knows they need the love) and/or library (ditto) and ask them to pre-order it for you.

My lovely promotions coordinator, Emily Shorthouse, and I are now making plans for me to visit a few places, and I’m really excited about that. After five years working on something, how nice to get to talk about and share the completed project. Watch this site for events near you and if you have any leads on readings or want me to come chat with your book club, please get in touch!

You can email me through my website or tweet me on my new Twitter handle, @lcarterwrites, and stay tuned for a new Facebook author page and big changes to my website in the next little while.

This will be my first tour since Lichen Bright came out and I did readings around Ontario from the marina in my hometown of Blind River to bars in Hamilton, Ottawa, Toronto and libraries in Elliot Lake and Huntsville. It was so much fun: the high point being the night I spent on Birch Lake Road outside Massey, drinking enough whisky with fellow poet, Charlie Smith, and my publisher, that I volunteered to sleep in the haunted room of his century-old farmhouse.

But that’s another story.

I’m looking forward to it, anyhow, and planning to extra-especially earn the break as I’m gunning to finish a first draft of the next book.

I can’t tell you anything about it, mind you. It’s still so tender and new – I’m only midway through Chapter Three – that any shared description or details might suck the life right out of it.

Suffice it to say that it’s a real relief to get started. I’ve spent a few weeks, maybe months, asking myself all those easy questions like if I were to die tomorrow what would I regret not writing? – so it feels good to be doing the work. Pre-writing is always the hardest, I find. All that stupid angst over whether or not it’s the right story, the perfect story, and what if it isn’t, and what if I fail, and blah, blah, blah.

Eventually it comes down to this: Nobody cares. Shut up. Pick up the damn pen. Get off Facebook. Write!