Give a band geek a pen

I’ve been a band geek since 6th grade, when I tried the clarinet for three weeks before switching to drums. I was a band geek in high school, and I was a band geek for five years at the University of North Texas, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in band geekery (aka music education). I was a band geek for four years after that, teaching young middle and high school band geeks in Texas.

Then I moved abroad, and for the first time the majority of what I did – my career – was unrelated to music. (I was still a geek, though.) Somehow I became a writer full-time, which was/is awesome and opened a lot of doors and has allowed me to do some pretty cool stuff.

Finding a balance with music and writing has been a struggle for me over the last few years. I might not be teaching marching band, or planning percussion ensemble concerts, or explaining to 6th graders why spit valves should only be used for good and not evil. But I still play music. I’m still a band geek.

So this went up in Publisher’s Marketplace today:

Michelle Schusterman’s I HEART BAND, a new chapter-book series about a French-horn-playing girl and her middle-school friends as they experience all the fun and roller-coaster adventures, dramas and crushes of life as band geeks, to Sarah Fabiny and Jordan Hamessley at Grosset & Dunlap, in a four-book deal, for publication in Summer 2014, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency (World).

WHAT.

There is no way for me to say how crazy and awesome this is. It’s been going on four years since I decided to try writing and publishing children’s books, and things moved at a glacial pace, until suddenly they didn’t. After a round of emails and phone calls that went by in a blur, I was officially asked to author a series about band geeks for Penguin.

Unreal.

I’m geeking out. Just a little.