Huge announcement time! My wife Aprilynne just sold World English rights to a four-book Young Adult series to Tara Weikum at Harper Children's, in a significant deal, in a pre-empt, through her agent Jodi Reamer at Writers House. Her book will hit the bookstores (in hardcover!) in the summer of 2009.

While it might be considered tacky to discuss this in personal terms, law school is expensive--especially since succeeding in law school can consume so many hours that work is out of the question. A significant number of my classmates are either single (lower living expenses), being supported by a working spouse, or being supported by wealthy parents. The rest of us get to take out loans, which at BYU never cover nearly enough of our expenses.

I've complained about this before. Law school seems deliberately skewed toward maintaining class boundaries. This is doubly true of "externships," those "work for course credit instead of money" programs that make it so difficult to get an internship, especially your first summer. Working for course credit is great, if someone else is paying your bills.

Well, I guess I can stop complaining. My wife, a woman of many talents who devotes significant effort toward caring for our three children, is also our primary breadwinner (again). So drop by her blog and congratulate her on yet another amazing accomplishment. She has spared you all 18 more months of me whining about how law school is too expensive and the internship/externship program is broken and... well, and so forth. I'm very proud of her.

Not that it's a huge surprise. There's something about the crowd you run with... Aprilynne is friends with the likes of Stephenie Meyer (of Twilight fame), Pat Wood (author of Lottery), John Elder Robison (whose book on Asperger's has been such a hit), and Michelle Zink (an author whose debut hits just before Aprilynne's). I'm sure there are others, but the point is, Aprilynne had a lot of help along the way from some really great people.

Anyhow, now I can focus more on complaining about other things, like the workload, the professors, and how the Chief Justice of the United States needs to read more philosophy. d^_^b