It was the night before ebook release and all through the house … not a creature was stirring—

Oh, hold it. Something was stirring. Something in the dark. The kind of something that only starts to lurk about once you’re asleep in your bed. It crawls up your staircase towards your room, its joints popping as It moves. You can’t see It because your eyes are closed, but Its form is blocking out the moonlight and casting a dim shadow under your door … which is opening. Wider and wider.

—Sorry, I got carried away.

You only get to be a debut author on the eve of his first ebook release once, so damn-it, I’m running with the theme here.

House of Sighs has been a long time coming. I wrote it over two years ago now while traveling abroad. It was pounded out in frenzied sessions on semi-working hostel computers at all hours of the night, on borrowed netbooks, in libraries, by hand in laundromats. When the time came to format the manuscript for Samhain (with the advanced readers copies needing to get out the door A.S.A.P.) my editor, Don, mentioned to me: “Aaron, there’s some seriously weird text elements in your Word document, like thousands—indents, symbols, characters that I’ve never seen before. Our IT department is scratching their heads. Some of it’s in Chinese.”

Hmmm.

I tell you, it was a long night stripping my entire manuscript down to the 300 page paragraph, italics-less, completely un-formatted form it took for me to rebuild it up from again. But it was worth it. Unequivocally worth it.

Those moments when I was pounding my head against the wall because I didn’t know whether or not to let a character live or die? Worth it. The intense mental anguish a single sentence can put you through? Worth it.

I don’t know what kind of future is in store for my wee book. It may slip into oblivion; people may hate it. Who can tell, really? One dude’s Bible is another dude’s toilet roll—it’s all a crapshoot. Yet at the end of the day, I’d be an idiot—and I probably wouldn’t deserve to be here, on the eve of eves—if I didn’t at least hope that House of Sighs has a shelf life. Just a little. I’m not looking for a falcon of success here … I’d happily settle for a little blood-splattered courier pigeon, just so long as somebody is there to receive its message.

Time will tell. I'll see you on the other side.

Oh, and watch out for that creature on the stairs. It’s hungry.