Breaking some huge personal news

This is the biggest news I have ever put in this newsletter

Yesterday, this announcement went up on a website called Publisher’s Marketplace, used by agents and editors in the book industry:

In case the weird run-on sentence format doesn’t make it clear: I have sold my first novel!!

This is something I have wanted to do since I was a kid. It is a big deal for me and I am very, very pumped.

Let’s break down that blob of text:

THE BLEB PROJECT by Forrest Brazeal

The novel is by me and THE BLEB PROJECT is what it’s called.

Imprint: Ballantine

Ballantine Books is an imprint of Penguin Random House, the biggest of the “Big Five” book publishers. I have read and enjoyed many books from Ballantine over the years, and I bet you have too. Here is one set of Ballantine editions that played a formative role in my life:

You’ve either never seen these covers, or you’ll never forget them. A lot of 80s sci-fi cover art was like that.

Publishing a book with Ballantine/PRH is a very big deal to me.

So what is this book about, anyway?

a novel that asks what happens when Silicon Valley invents time travel

Silicon Valley invents the time machine. That is the elevator pitch. I started writing this in late 2023, while I was still at Google. I’d known for awhile I wanted to do a book about a tech bubble from beginning to end - I’d seen AI and crypto firsthand, and the shadow of the dot-com boom and bust still looms over the industry. Enough to see that there’s kind of an archetypal shape to these things, an almost mythic rise and fall of greed, hubris, and straight-up idiocy alongside all the technological gimcrackery.

mixing satire and science fiction

The tech industry is joyfully ludicrous and I wanted to do a satire, but I didn’t want to do HBO’s Silicon Valley. That story has been told, and updating it for the political climate of the 2020s didn’t seem worth the effort.

So I thought maybe I should mix in a science-fiction element.

I woke up one morning in a hotel in Sunnyvale, California, with a 102-degree fever, and thought: "What if there was a time-travel bubble?”

a naïve young engineer, a crusading journalist, and a jaded big tech executive … start-up bros, predatory venture capitalists, and conscience-free billionaires

The novel is told in mockumentary format, like an oral history—think Max Brooks’ World War Z, but with more reply-all email threads. I tried to include some real characters, with real feelings, who grow and change in surprising ways—the silly technobabble is the least interesting part of this story.

to Julian Pavia at Ballantine, in a preempt … (world)

I submitted the novel to several publishers via my wonderful agent at Howard Morhaim Literary, but Julian was my first choice. He’s edited some of my favorite recent science-fiction novels, and maybe some of yours too:

• Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

• Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter and Recursion

• Andy Weir’s The Martian and Project Hail Mary

Nobody’s better at books that jump the tracks from the speculative-fiction genre to general audiences everywhere. I could not be more stoked to be working with Julian and his team.

“In a preempt” means that Ballantine offered a somewhat larger advance payment on the book in exchange for signing an immediate deal, rather than the book being auctioned off between multiple competing publishers. And “(world)” means that Penguin Random House bought the worldwide publishing rights, so that maybe someday you’ll be able to read or listen to THE BLEB PROJECT in your own language, in whatever country you live in.

Film: Michael Prevett at Circle of Confusion

Apparently I now have a film/TV agent? Who knows what that will turn into, if anything, but I guess if you’re one of the many big-time Hollywood producers who read this newsletter, you know who to contact.

There, now you know everything about the publishing industry that I know.

The traditional publishing process is long, long, long, so it will likely be 2026 before the book is finally on shelves. For now, I’m still just in shock that this is actually happening. I’ve been scribbling stories since I was nine years old. I’ve done niche nonfiction, I’ve done short stories, I’ve self-published, but a for-real novel with a major publisher feels like a whole different thing. I’m not going to aw-shucks about it. It’s a big deal, especially for a dude from the Carolina Piedmont with no formal writing training and no connections whatsoever in the publishing industry.

I will share more news as it happens.

Just for fun

But don’t worry, I’m still going to be drawing plenty of silly cartoons.