It's official

Yes, it's official. I'm an author.
For those who don't know what's going on, let me back up a few months. To August of this year. A friend and I shared driving duties to travel down to Killer Nashville, a mystery writers' conference. This is an annual conference for writers' and mystery book fans. The three day event featured various seminars to help the writer to better his/her craft and learn about writing techniques. Everything from weapons, to blood splatter analyses, DNA (did you realize the CSI shows are wrong when the investigators get back DNA results in less than about three days?), to editing, querying and much much more. It was a great conference and I enjoyed every seminar.
Plus, I was able to meet and speak with and listen to fascinating stories by author J. A. Jance.
I also made several contacts with people in the writing business.
The most important aspect about the conference was that I was able to pitch a story idea to four agents/editors from various publishing houses/agencies. Now, most of the writers who pitched their ideas were asked to submit either a few chapters an X amount of pages, etc. This is common. The agents like to listen to the ideas, get a feel for what people are writing, ask questions, then in the future decide whether to accept.
When I returned home I immediately submitted to the four places. Within a couple of days, I was rejected by one. A couple of weeks later, I decided to submit another story, I had also written but hadn't pitched to a couple of the agencies (the third wasn't accepting the genre). In September and October I received two more rejections.
Late October and I receive an email from Echelon Press (www.Echelonpress.com). When I see the sender my first thought was "Here is the fourth rejection; I'll have to start over with someplace else." When I opened the email, my brain was automatically scanning for the all too familiar words. However, this is what I saw:

Hi, Stephen.

I would like to offer you a contract with Echelon Press for both Night Shadows and Beta, to be published in ebook format. This is the only format we are offering for now. Please let me know if you are interested - if so, I'll send you a copy of the contract with instructions on what to do next.

Well, I had to read the email a second time to see it wasn't a rejection but an acceptance. Then I read it a third time to realize Echelon wanted BOTH stories.

My reaction? (Well, my ceiling still has a little depression from the top of my head.)
So, I receive the contracts, fill them out, sign them and send them back.
Today, December 7, I receive my copies signed by he president of Echelon.
So now, I'm on my way. I should be on the schedule to be e-published sometime in 2011.
I want to say thanks to everyone for their support and please check back because I hope to be doing weekly blogs about various topics and will keep you informed about the progress of the two e-books. Also, within a month I should have a website up and running so check back for information about that.

Let the fun begin!