Laura wasn’t sure how many attention-getting words to put into that headline — Free! — Give-Away! — Contest! — but she figures that three ought to do for now. Her publisher, Grand Central Books (formerly known as Warner Books) has offered to sponsor a Free Book Give-Away Contest! on her website, and they suggested one where people interested in winning a free book would write something and the five best entries would receive a free book.

This sounded great to Laura, except for the fact that she’s not sure if anyone other than her family and a handful of friends (and a whole bunch of pornographic spam senders) reads her blog, which might mean a slight dearth (or lack) of contestants and entries. But as someone who has always been accused (correctly) of being overly negative, Laura decided for once to try to be positive and so she’s going to give this contest idea a shot.

Laura can’t remember if this particular idea came from her unbelievably fantastic on-line publicist from Grand Central Books — Miriam Parker, who not only works a real job-job but is also finishing up her MFA in creative writing, writing a novel, and working for a really impressive literary journal that comes out of the University of North Carolina Wilmington called Ecotone:

Here’s the link to “Failing at Cancer: Part 1″ that’s up now on the Huffington Post. This is the first part of seven parts that will run on the Huffington Post in the near future. “Failing at Cancer” was one of the long pieces Laura wrote for her FAILURE, A LOVE STORY book that is, well, failing, so she decided to chop it up and post it there and get the word out on failure….

Here’s what I just posted on my blog or plog on amazon.com – I hadn’t posted anything there for almost a year (or over a year) and I figured what better time than now since Piece of Work is now in paperback…..

“Just a quick new post — the first in a year (I don’t like to overdo it) — to say that Piece of Work is coming out in paperback on November 5. It’s published by Grand Central Publishing, which is the new name for Warner Books and is already available here so no need to wait three more weeks. Buy now!”

It was quite a year — promoting the hardcover edition of Piece of Work, my first book in over 4 years, and then recovering from breast reconstruction surgery (as opposed to recovering from breast cancer itself: I was lucky that mine was caught early and was Stage 0) took up most of my time. The rest of my time was taken up trying to post fairly regularly on my website’s “brant” (brag+rant), guest-blogging for the Huffington Post, and starting a new book.

The new book I started, Failure: A Love Story, Or Why Being a Negative Catastrophizing Anti-Optimist is a Good Thing, is about a topic I love and am fascinated by, but since so many people are afraid of failure and don’t know what to think when you say you love failure — they think, instantly, that you are a negative catastrophizing anti-optimist and they can’t imagine what positive things you could possibly say about failure which is, of course, the whole point of the book — to embrace failure and believe in the idea that without failure we would all be nothing — I may end up promoting failure and my love for it in a different way other than a book with failure in the title.

“Please visit my website, read my brant, and wait for news on my new blog on failure which will 1) focus on my own and other peoples’ failures in order to prove that failure is truly universal and 2) provide a place to go when you feel you are simply too big a loser to go on that will make you feel better since you will see lots and lots of other failures who have failed in much bigger and worse ways than you have. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the failure blog will be a “feel good” blog.

“I look forward to sharing all my heartfelt and fact-based theories on the upside of failure very soon…..