It’s true. Hardest secret I’ve had to keep — and I’m not really sure I did since, somehow, many of you seemed to know about this long ago — but it feels good today to say this book I’ve written comes out next week.

I’m not even sure where to begin, though I’m sure we’ll talk about this plenty in the coming days and weeks, but I’d say Jack’s review is a pretty good start. I agree with every word he wrote!

Hopefully this explains some unexplained absences here over the past several months and the days when we had two posts instead of three and merely funny and insightful posts instead of hilarious and indefatigable ones. The occasional surly behavior, bags under the eyes and titanium-infused writer’s block, I’m sad to say, were unrelated.

We’re going to have some fun with this, I promise you. I have great and funny friends and I’ve had a lot of great and funny people offer to and agree to help me with promoting this. You’ll recognize a few of them and you’ll learn to like some of the others. We’re going to laugh.

Also, the book has a Facebook page, now open to the public. Keep an eye on that. I don’t want to flood this space or my Twitter feed with book news, reviews and events — I will, but I don’t want to.

There will be some events in Morgantown and other spots and there’s going to be a launch party here at the end of the month. I’ve even figured out a way to help others with this. Obviously, I stand to gain something out of this endeavor, but I want to make sure others do, too.

As for keeping this secret, I’ll have to make that right with some people, some people who probably should have known about this long ago. Two things in my defense:

1) I keep secrets, sometimes to a fault.
2) I didn’t want to tell anyone during football season because I didn’t want anyone to be wary of me during football season.

Now, that might sound a little shady, and I get that because perhaps you may think I was embedded in disguise. You should know very little of the 2011-12 season is covered in the book. I knew that going in and I didn’t see any use telling people and making them worry about something that they didn’t need to worry about.

There is one chapter about the season, and the epilogue is, of course, shaped strongly by the season’s events, but I assure you nothing I wrote has anything to do with or is at all affected by some sort of literary espionage or access under false pretenses. I was just kind of there for it and, to be completely honest with you, I was really thrown for a loop by a lot of the things that happened. They didn’t fit my story until one day when I realized they did.

Hard to explain buy, hey, you’ll have to buy the book.

I don’t know, maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this, but trust and honesty are big, big things for me and I don’t want anyone anywhere thinking I violated that.

Anyway, thanks for getting this far. I hope my big head didn’t obstruct your view. I’m going to leave this post up all day because it’s a really busy day. I’ve got a football luncheon later this morning, basketball interviews at noon and then a 4 p.m. flight to New York. If it goes all chalk, I should be at Madison Square Garden by tipoff Wednesday.