Good news for me

I'm relieved to know that we can now be certain my book won't be the worst one published in 2008. Truly -- I mean, having read it about 42 times (for editing, rather than narcissistic, purposes), I'm a little sick of it, and I think most writers eventually get insecure about their stuff.

Still, no matter how crappy mine is, apparently it's virtually guaranteed that Jonah Goldberg's is worse.

Ezra has the details, my favorite of which is (via the comments) that the jacket of the book contains this gem: "The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore." According to the commenter, neither of those schools actually *offers* a degree in education per se. So I guess there is no quintessential liberal fascist -- another relief!

As for mine, I have this EXCLUSIVE NEWS: I have brought Joe Klein and Glenn Greenwald to agreement for the first time ever. History is made: They both loved it. More on this after the new year, though. Developing, as they say . . .

. . . added, I should really explain this a little more. I've really only mentioned my book tangentially on the blog before, so here's the very abbreviated background: Before joining the august AMERICAblog community, I was an intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, essentially the spy arm of the DoD. After two years of work there, including a six month deployment to Baghdad, I resigned from the Iraq office because I felt the analysis continued to be manipulated and misrepresented due to a combination of ideology and incompetence.

I ended up writing a book about the experience, and through a very lucky chain of events, much of which is owed to the blogosphere, it was purchased for publication by Random House and will hit the shelves in February. Again, I'll have much more to say about it as we get closer to publication, but I think (hope!) that y'all will find it interesting and worth your time to check out.