I don't normally use this forum to blather about what's happening in my career; what's oh-so-exciting to me is probably boring as dry toast to you. However, this time I'm making an exception, because Novelspot, and this very column/blog, played a key role in making something pretty unusual happen in a writer's life.

I'll give you the back story as succinctly as possible: Girl grows up loving to write. Girl spends a couple decades writing articles, stories, books, selling occasionally, getting plenty of rejection slips. Girl finds publishers for her work but they tend to go out of business without warning. Girl decides she is sick of the frustration, will publish her own work from now on, swears off submissions forever.

Fast forward about three years. Here I am, happily humming along publishing my books with a reasonable amount of success. Then one day (April 13, 2009 to be exact) I get an email that starts out, "I came across your writing as I was searching the Web looking for potential writers to author a book idea. I found your piece 'Bite Me Please: The Erotic Lure of the Vampire' and really liked it."

The reference was to a four-year-old Explorotica column that Novelspot has been kind to host all that time. The author of the email was the Publishing Director of Sellers Publishing, a 15-year-old, successful and fast-growing independent publisher that you may well have heard of. They currently have about 600 titles on Amazon and books on the shelves of stores everywhere. (Meanwhile Living Beyond Reality Press has eight titles on Amazon, which ain't bad for a teeny tiny house I guess.) In short, they were very much for real.

Robin from Sellers wasn't sure if I, as an author with my own publishing house, would consider writing a book they wanted to do. But she felt I might be the perfect person for the job and hoped I would hear out her proposal.

Anyone who has been in the writing business for more than a few years (or in my case, decades) is too skeptical to jump up and down upon reading such an email. A publisher contacting you out of the blue to write their book? What happened to all that frustrating business with submissions and agents and such? This is not the sort of thing that happens in the publishing world.

But obviously I wanted to know what the book idea was, and their proposal. Robin told me the idea, and I have never wanted to write a book so much in my life. We talked, I drafted an outline, she pitched me and the book idea to the company president, he was so thrilled he moved up the publication date nine months and I was offered a lovely contract with a very generous advance. (In case you didn't already guess, when you publish your own books, you do not get an advance.) Best of all, I was given the opportunity to write a truly fantastic book.

This would all be amazing enough if I had been going through the usual routine of submitting outlines and sample chapters to agents and publishers. But that it fell into my lap while I was busy doing other things? Wha?

I sent Sellers the first chapter. They moved the publication date up another two months. I didn't mind a bit that it will be out for Christmas 2009 and I certainly love that everyone at Sellers seems just as excited about this title as I am. I kept writing madly…it seemed this was a book my mind was waiting to spit out.

So I am currently nearly done with the first draft, the cover design is finished, and Sellers has promo underway big time (like the fan page they created on Facebook, complete with photos of readers looking at mocked-up copies). The book was possibly Sellers’ star title to be pitched to retailers at the industry-leading BookExpo America show in New York City this week.

This whole thing went down in six weeks, which those of you familiar with traditional publishing know is like lightning.

So, what's the book? Well, I certainly hope you're wondering that by now! LOL It's entitled How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step by Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful. If you'd like to see the cover and read a synopsis, please visit that link.

A few paragraphs back I used the phrase "fell into my lap." That's not exactly accurate, I guess. I have been writing passionately and copiously since I was in junior high school (scarily, I'm talking about the 1960s), and meanwhile I'll bet there are a good million words of mine on the Internet by now. I remind you that the particular Novelspot column Robin found via Google was there for four years.

Still, without Novelspot she may never have found me, and I would not have gotten this assignment to write a book that will be so fun, so fascinating, and, I hope, so meaningful.

Anyway, I just wanted to write about the whole thing and say thanks to Allie and the Novelspot crew.

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, and the vampire romance Bloodchained (www.bloodchained.com). Diana's works are published by Living Beyond Reality Press (www.livingbeyondreality.com.) Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com or enjoy her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com.