Happiness at friends' successes

Alex Chee has sold his new novel:

THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT, inspired by a story of P.T. Barnum's nineteenth-century American tour of Jenny Lind, about an orphaned farm girl who makes her way from Minnesota to Paris and transforms herself from a courtesan into a world-renowned opera singer gifted with the most ethereal and transcendent of voices, to Houghton Mifflin, for publication in fall 2007.

And don't miss the RADAR reading series this Tuesday.

Then again, it's dangerous to read too many descriptions of just-sold novels:

...about a teenage mother who flees post-Glasnost Russia by becoming a mail-order bride and lands finally as a maid in the home of a wealthy Chicago family -- as the search for her own long-lost father and the path back to her daughter redeem her challenging, darkly humorous journey.

... in which a local realtor discovers it is awfully hard to find a kidnapped kid, catch a murderer, and tame two unruly Afghan hounds while trying to deal with her maternal urges and her growing attraction for the father of her step-daughter's twins.

... about a talk show host whose late night radio show discusses everyday ethics and annoying behavior who is on a mission to get people to stop talking on cell phones in public -- but she goes too far and risks losing everything before discovering how easy it is to become as bad as the people she's judging, and ultimately how wonderful it is to fall in love with someone unexpected.

Those are descriptions from a daily email blatt I receive from Publisher's Marketplace, listing book that have just been sold. Maybe my book will be there too someday, and its capsule description may look just as ridiculous, but they sure look strange.