I’ve mentioned in passing here and there online that I have been working on a YA fantasy but now that I have received an editorial letter that runs 11 single-spaced pages I think I can safely announce:

via my agent Russell Galen of the Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency I have sold an all new all original (new world) YA fantasy to Andrea Spooner at Little Brown Young Reader, the children’s/YA division of Hachette Book Group.

The book’s working title is MASK (subject to change).

The industry announcement of the sale describes it thusly:

A girl’s skill at a forbidden sport shakes the foundations of a rigid aristocracy.

That’s a decent assessment of the plot although it barely scrapes the surface of what the book is actually about.

My pitch line goes like this:

Little Women meets the Count of Monte Cristo in a fantasy setting inspired by Greco-Roman Egypt.

So that’s the GREAT news. I’m super excited to be working with LBYR and with editor Andrea Spooner and her assistant Deirdre Jones and the whole fabulous crew there.

The bad news? Well, I can’t say there is really any bad news in this wonderful project. However, the lead time for YA publishing is a lot longer than it is for adult fiction. The first draft is done (and in fact my agent and I agreed that to try to enter the YA field I needed to submit a manuscript rather than a proposal so I wrote the book on spec and sold it based on a complete manuscript). But given the time frame, what with space built in for revisions and LBYR’s timeline in which they want to be able to produce clean ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) 6 – 9 months before publication, MASK (or whatever title it picks up) will be published in the Spring/Summer 2015 season.

So, yeah, that’s a long time. But I’m still super excited that this is going to be a really great project.

Tomorrow I’ll have more news to announce. It’s gotten busy around here.