Omar Abed's Blog

I've got good news and bad news.

The Good News:

It's official!

My next book, The Book That Almost Rhymed, has been signed by Dial Books for Young Readers!

Dial is part of Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., and I couldn't be happier to have landed with them!

(Fun fact: Dial published The Book With No Pictures, by B.J. Novak from the Office. This guy --->)

(Can you tell that I'm missing when The Office was on Netflix?)

And the book is due to come out...

(cue the bad news)

in...

We've all been through a lot these past few months. I'm exhausted of reading people's various takes on coronavirus, as I'm sure most people are, so I'll make this part brief. In an attempt to draw parallels, I realized that the past few months have carried three personal lessons in patience. Coronavirus is the obvious one. We don't know when this situation will end, or how long we'll be expected to adapt. By necessity, we are forced to cope in patient perseverance. The second lesson came with...

It's hard to believe, but "You, Me, and a Tree" launched just this month. In fact, I was one of the last ones to actually see it published.

For a picture book to tell a story effectively, the words and illustrations have to work together. Lucky for me, I found Nejla Shojaie...

I am publishing my first book, "You, Me, and a Tree". It is a picture book, but that doesn't mean it's just for kids.

One week. That's how long it took for me to miss my target of once-a-week blog posts. It's tough. If I write a blog post, I'm not working on the book. If I work on the book, I'm missing an opportunity to keep you all in the loop on my progress. I've always been bad at balancing my time. With me, it's either all or nothing. One thing or another. I started to learn balance nearly 2 years ago, when I got married. My wife, Arkann, taught me that you can't always be programming, writing, working.....

This whole thing is new to me. I am generally a private person. I prefer to work on my projects in secret, whether it be my next big web project or a new personal undertaking. I would rather surprise people with the results than bring them along for the ride. But this whole process of writing, publishing, marketing... It's all new. It requires me to open up a bit more. It begs me to be more transparent. Really, it is all just an extension of what writing has been to me for the past 15 years -...