Well, I still can't name names--actually, maybe I can, but I don't want to jinx anything so just to play it safe I won't--but we weighed offers, counteroffers, and counter-counteroffers and finally agreed on a deal that will bring My Teacher is a Superhero to a bookstore near you tentatively in May of 2010, with the sequel hot on its heels in July. The deal is for a four book series, so I'm now at work trying to plot out the overarching story arc.
My plan for the whole series to conclude with a revelation that will completely change everything you've read and cast it in a new light. When trying to think of a way to illustrate what I meant, I think I came up with the worst possible example.
Watch this scene from the conclusion of 1985's Teen Wolf. Michael J. Fox's team has just beat their arch rivals, the team with the guy who's Teen Wolf's bitter nemesis. What makes it so touching is that the Beavers won without Michael J. Fox turning into the Wolf, but instead by using teamwork and a renewed confidence in themselves. To top things off, the sexy blond who only dates the most popular guys homes in on Michael J. Fox, but gets rejected as he expresses his fondness for the mousy brunette who's been his friend all along, but promises to be so much more.
Now go back to the 37 second mark and look at the guy at the top of the screen in the red shirt and blue jeans. See how his pants are unzipped and he's exposing either his white underwear or maybe worse? Every time you watch this scene for the rest of your life, you won't think about the valuable life lesson we all learned about being ourselves. You'll think about some extra sitting in a crowd scene eagerly awaiting his chance to jump up and let his junk hang out with the passionate hope the editors wouldn't catch it.
And that's what's going to happen when you read the final book of my series. Not that some guy who's an extra exposes himself--though I might be able to work that in--but that you'll no longer be able to see the first three books in the same way and will reread them with a completely different understanding.
Oh, you know what's a better example? The Prestige! The second time you watch that movie, it's a completely different film because Christian Bale's character is seen in a whole new way and practically every line of his dialogue has a new meaning. Yeah, can we just forget I even said anything about Teen Wolf?
Even before Hillary Clinton declared she was running for President, she was leading national polls. Before Iowans ever caucused, the question was whether Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson would oppose her. For that matter, her campaign essentially began in November of 2004 once John Kerry was defeated.
That month also marked the opening of the Suns 2004 season with Steve Nash back in a Phoenix uniform. While teams like the Spurs, Pistons, and Lakers were bringing home championships in the previous decade-and-then-some, the NBA's ratings were bottoming out as basketball devolved into a game of clock management and intentional fouls with an emphasis on not letting the other guys score, even at the expense of your own scoring. Even the Shaq-Kobe "Return of Showtime" Lakers of the 1999-2002 averaged 100.9 points per game; the defensive "playoff basketball playing" Knicks of 1992-93 averaged 101.6.*
In the years that followed, the Suns finished with 54 and 61 wins, but lost the the playoffs both years. Finally, in 2008, as the trade deadline approached, Phoenix's front office saw the writing on the wall and traded speedy, athletic forward Shawn Marion to the Miami Heat for lumbering, elderly Shaquille O'Neal. While the loss of Marion (who'd felt "disrespected" by Suns management and intended to sign elsewhere when his contract ended) didn't have the impact of watching Dan Majerle go to Cleveland, the message was the same. The Suns were going to follow the pack and sacrifice their own identity to become a knock off of the Spurs/Lakers/Heat/Pistons in the hopes of winning a title.
Worse, if the title came, Suns fans would forever have to admit it was all courtesy of Shaq. In truth, when the Suns were knocked out in the first round by the Spurs, it was a relief for many in Phoenix.
Starting in late 2006 and throughout 2007, Hillary Clinton made herself a beacon of hope, a reminder of pre-Bush America. But when the early primaries began, she found herself being outscored by another hopeful candidate, Barack Obama. With an eye toward winning the championship White House, she and her husband followed the same line of thinking that the Suns did and adopted the strategies and tactics of the classless, graceless thugs who'd beaten up on them in the past.
And then there the whole "contesting" election results in Florida thing.
With every primary further indicating Clinton cannot win the nomination, she has become more determined not to let ruining a man's career--nor the future of the Democratic Party--stand in the way of her winning.
In turn, the more she adopts the Rove-ian style of play, the less those of us who once considered ourselves Clinton fans are rooting for her. In fact, much like fans faced with the Shaq-led Suns, many who longed for Bill Clinton to return to prominence are now actively rooting against the Clintons and hoping this semi-final series will end in sooner rather than later.
Hillary Clinton has adopted a strategy that goes against everything we thought she stood for and Bill Clinton has tainted our memories of him. There is no way they can win, but they will not admit defeat until they drag Obama down with them.
There are some who want to win at all costs, whether that means cheating, lying, buying victory, hurting others, or just playing by the letter of the rules instead of their spirit. Then there are those who would rather lose than taint the game. I wish it were true than cheaters never prosper, but that's simply not the case 95% of the time. In fact, most sadly, those who believe in truth, justice, and that mythological American Way more often than not find themselves turning to Shaquille O'Neal and "Hot Rod" Williams when they think it might mean victory.
So when John McCain is elected to George Bush's third term, whether it be over a Barack Obama who's been so battered by his own party that he cannot mount a suitable campaign against the Republican machine or over a Hillary Clinton who convinced the Democratic Party to hand her the nomination and alienate more than half its members, know it could have been avoided if the Democrats had just looked at the Suns first round exit and the history of "Hot Rod" Williams.
*Granted, in the long run a difference of 0.7 points per game (57 point scattered throughout the entire season) may not seem like much, but we're talking about the difference between a high-scoring offense with two of the highest scoring player in NBA history versus a team that was touted as a collection of defensive specialists without a lot of offensive talent. To put things in further perspective, the Bad Boy Pistons of the 1988-1990 repeat champs averaged 105.5.
**This could be related to the fact less than 10% of Americans had ever seen a television in 1948... and that only 18 cities nationwide had television stations... and that the NBA Finals weren't broadcast in 1948...
Would you sell your soul to win a championship?
If you didn't live in Arizona during the 1992-93 NBA season, it's hard to conceive the cult-like fervor that overcame Phoenix with the arrival of Charles Barkley. Everything was about the Suns. Roughly one out of every two people you saw anywhere you went was wearing purple. Every news story somehow seemed to relate to the Suns. 
Sports talk radio hosts didn't know how to handle it. Thriving on disdain and living on a diet of disgust, guys like Arnie Spanner and Bruce Jacobs had nothing of substance to say other than screaming, "Hey, Suns fans!" repeatedly in annoying New York accents. While the Phoenix might win 62 games in the regular season, their style of play would never work in the playoffs, they insisted. Instead, the New York Knicks would be hoisting the title because they played "playoff basketball," which is to say they were classless, graceless thugs who would let a little thing like "not inflicting career ending injuries on opponents" get in the way of victory.
Unfortunately, the fairy tale season didn't have the fairy tale ending. After winning 62 games, including several that made a convincing argument that if there was a god in heaven, he was rooting for the Suns--like Oliver Miller's inbound pass off the backboard with half a second on the clock in Portland that was missed for a dunk by Cedric Ceballos but instead fell into Barkley's paw and was underhand tossed into the hoop for a one point win--the year ended with a loss in the NBA Finals to Michael Jordan's Bulls.
In the years to come, owner Jerry Colangelo was constantly looking for the one thing that could put Phoenix over the top. Suns legend Tom Chambers was replaced by A.C. Green. Cedric Ceballos was let go in favor of injury-waiting-to-happen Danny Manning. 
Meanwhile, the Houston Rockets had won back-to-back championships by building around shot blocking center Hakeem Olajuwon and a renewed commitment to offense. Those titles came against Patrick Ewing's Knicks and Shaquielle O'Neal's Magic. The message to NBA front offices everywhere was clear: championships weren't won by scoring more points than your opponent; they were won by keeping your opponent from scoring more points than you by putting a lumbering center in the paint to block shots and surrounding him with sociopaths (John Starks, Anthony Mason, Vernon Maxwell) who were more likely to crush a man's skull and drink the sweet nectar inside than they were to execute a bounce pass.
No one better epitomized this shift in thinking than Mike Fratello when he took over the coaching duties of the woeful Cleveland Cavaliers. Knowing his team couldn't score very many points, he put forth a game plan in which players would milk the shot clock for the full 24 seconds before ever taking a shot, crash the boards for rebounds (ideally grabbing the missed shot so they could milk another 24 seconds from the game), and prevent opponents from ever gaining any offensive flow through thuggery and intentional fouls. It was ugly, terrible basketball, but the Suns decided it was exactly what they wanted to be.
So the decision was made to trade away Dan Majerle for John "Hot Rod" Williams. Majerle was a golden god in Phoenix, but the media decided to place every playoff loss at his feet. When the trade was announced, talk radio hosts cheered, assured that his 1.2 blocks per game were going to be the difference that brought a championship banner to America West Arena. 
It was the beginning of the end of any interest I had in the NBA and marked the start of a precipitous decline for the Suns. It also raised the question I posed at the beginning of this column, whether a title was worth more than your soul.
Four days before the Suns season opening win against the Clippers, the United States elected Bill Clinton to be the 42nd President of the United States. It wasn't long before the economy, mired in recession, was booming like never before and the United States settled into its role as the world's only superpower. Much like the sports talk hosts above, the media couldn't handle so much positivity. Sure, there were more people becoming millionaires under the Clinton Administration than ever before, but they were having to pay more taxes than and weren't praising Jesus as much as they would if a Republican was in the White House.
Similar to the NBA general managers of the late 90's, the Republican Party became fixated not on winning elections by putting forth better candidates, but by convincing the public that their opponents were the worse candidates. Like the Knicks, the Republican congress became classless, graceless thugs who wouldn't let something like ruining a person's career or public reputation stand in the way of a meaningless piece of legislation or a House seat.
It came to a head in the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton. Like the 1993-94 Houston/New York NBA Finals, there was nothing good to be said of the debacle. It was ugliness for the sake of ugliness and anyone with a sense of fairness on either side of the political spectrum was embarrassed to watch it, just as anyone with a love for basketball found it hard to stomach watching 
Two years later, Karl Rove used the same attitudes and strategies to get George W. Bush the Republican nomination and, eventually, the White House. The eight years of abject failure and destruction of America led many to reminisce fondly of the Clinton Days... when a President lied about his sex life but was honest about the wars he waged on the other side of the world... when 18 soldiers being killed in Somalia was reason for uproar instead of barely being worth a mention on page 17 of the newspaper... when reports titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack on American Soil" got some attention...
In 2004, the United Nations suggested it would consider Bill Clinton as Secretary General (the next Secretary General was supposed to come from Asia, but the Asian representation agreed to defer it's turn if Clinton was put forth as a nominee), but Bush wasn't going to nominate his predecessor to a title that some could see as higher than his own. Shortly thereafter, Clinton suggested the 22nd Amendment should be rewritten to allow a former two-term president to run for a third term as long as another president was elected between the two terms. Unfortunately, romanticized as it might be another Clinton presidency was an impossibility.
Or was it?
Is there anything more boring than the final two to three minutes of a close NBA game?
I mean other than soccer and church.
Just when things should be most exciting, you get an intentional foul, a guy shooting free throws, a time out, and four or five seconds of guys running around while the losing team tries to hit a shot as quickly as possible. Then the whole thing repeats. The two minutes of playing time takes about 20 minutes and the majority of the action takes place on inbounds plays where eight guys run around like extras in a disaster film while another does jumping jacks in front of the guy trying to get the ball in.
I blame Pat Riley.