Today’s the release of the new Simon & Schuster Pocket Star e-book edition of Pike.  I love everything about this release. Pike was my first novel, one that I never actually meant to have published. It was supposed to be a practice book to help me learn the craft. It’s a personal book to me, written when my daughter was first born. She was colicky, and I thought up most of the book up while walking her all over Cincinnati, because walking was the only thing that would calm her down. I’d talk to her the whole time, often telling her the story that would become the book.

It’s a tough town, Cincinnati. We lived there not too long after a series of riots set off by the police killing of an unarmed black kid. Everybody was on edge. We didn’t live in any of the worst neighborhoods, but we lived one neighborhood over, and I always took a handgun in the diaper bag on our walks, because we walked everywhere. Ever since she was six years old, my daughter would ask me if she could read Pike, and I would say, no, not yet. But you’ve been everywhere in the book.

Anyways, the new version’s out today, and I’m thrilled with it. I love the cover, I love the fact that I got to fix some stuff that always bugged me, and I love the fact that it’s out there at a price point where pretty much anybody could afford to give it a shot.

If you’d like to, you can order it from Simon & Schuster, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Kindle, Nook, or Google Play.