Yes, the past few weeks I’ve been twittering about working on something called the #secretschrammproject. In reality I’ve been working on it for even longer than that, and there has been a lot of times where I worked on it but didn’t actually tell anyone about it. It’s a long story, longer than I can tell here, and most of it would bore you anyway. But here’s what I’d like you to know right now:

I’m working on a book.

That’s not really news — I’ve been working on a book for a while now, actually on a couple of books with various amounts of seriousness. Originally I wanted to write a novel, and I still plan to write a novel, but this book isn’t that novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, and I’ve probably written about two novels over the years (three if you count one that’s really terrible), but I don’t think I really have anything that’s novel-length that’s really that good. And when I finally set out a goal to publish something this year, I decided that I still wasn’t really good enough to hammer out one story and really make it fly as my first chance out of the gate. I’d like to think I could, but honestly, I don’t think I can.

So what I’ve decided to do is publish an ebook myself instead. Personally, I’ve been using ebooks more and more — reading them on my iPhone and checking them out on the Kindle and the iPad, and I think there’s a lot of value to a book in “e-form,” if you will. I’ll be selling this ebook on a few different marketplaces (iBooks and the Kindle Store, and here on the website as a PDF and an ePub file or whatever you need it as), so anyone with any kind of reader will be able to download it and check it out. And because I’m doing it myself, I won’t have to worry about selling it to an agent or a publisher before I sell it to you readers — I’ll just be able to put it up and if you want to, you can come grab and enjoy it.

So what will it be? That’s the fun part. I have a ton of writing that I’ve done in various places in the past — not on TUAW or WoW Insider or Joystiq, but just little fiction pieces and essays and other short things, that have appeared both here on my own website and on other various places around the net. This will basically be a collection of those — not all of them, but a nice tidy collection of some of my best short pieces. I’ll re-work and republish some of my favorite pieces in the past (that you may not have seen before, as they’re hidden in the archives or have disappeared from the ‘net already), I’ll put in some pieces that never actually saw print but were written a while ago, and I’m working on some new pieces that no one has ever seen before, too. All told, I’m aiming for about ten to twenty of these little essays — every one of them makes me laugh, so hopefully you’ll like them as well. It’ll kind of be a greatest hits collection, except that you’ll never have seen most of the pieces before.

I’m also planning to put in a bunch of extras — I am hoping to commission some art to include in among the stories (because I loved reading the old Sherlock Holmes books with the old Sidney Paget drawings and mysterious captions beneath them, not to mention that there are a lot of artists on the Internet whose work I really admire), and I am planning to invite some guests to help me out with some text as well. Because I’m publishing this all myself, I hope to make it something really interesting and special — it’ll still be an actual ebook in that it’s a file you can download, but I love books as much as anyone and I’m really excited about the chance to be able to make my own. I get to set up an ISBN! I may put together a glossary and/or footnotes. If you like reading, you’ll probably love this book.

Anyway, it’s still a ways out — I don’t have an actual title to share with you yet (“A Werewolf Orientation Manual and Other Stories” is the best I’ve got so far, but I don’t think that will be it), and quite a few of the stories are still being worked on. I haven’t started putting the file together yet at all, which I expect to take a little while in terms of design and technical tweaking. If you want a date, I’m aiming for sometime in July, though it could be later than that. Definitely before the summer ends.

I haven’t landed on a price yet either, but it won’t be any more than ten dollars, probably not even that. I would give it away for free, but I want an iPad, people. Daddy needs gadget money. And hopefully the product will be enjoyable enough that it’ll be worth it. I’ll do my best.

So anyway, that’s the plan. Stay tuned — I’ll eventually be sharing some excerpts here, of course, and I will definitely let you know everywhere when it’s available.

In fact, if you want to get regular email updates about the book, send me a note at mike AT mikeschramm.com with the subject line of “secretschrammproject” and I’ll include you on a makeshift email list, which I promise never to sell or spam you with. And heck, I just thought of this now, but if you join that list, I’ll probably give you a special offer or a discount on the whole thing when it’s out anyway. How exciting is that!

If you’re reading this, it means you are interested in what I’m doing, and for that I am so incredibly grateful that I can’t really put it all into simple words. Thank you. Thanks very much, and stay tuned for more on this thing going forward.