I’m writing this on June 8th. Right Back Where We Started From came out on May 4th. It has been over a month now, and I can finally breathe a little after this whirlwind. Promoting and publishing a debut novel is intense.

One of the best experiences so far was the moment writers always dream about, when you open the box from your publisher and pull out the book. It was quite surreal. Here are a couple of pictures of me holding my book for the first time:

Note the painting I’m sitting under. It’s by the artist M. Maxwell. Kyle and I bought the painting years ago because it reminded us of Vira, the grandmother in Right Back Where We Started From. It seemed appropriate to be sitting under her severe gaze while pulling out the book for the first time.

Alta Magazine has been so supportive of Right Back Where We Started From! They featured me on Alta Live and ran an excerpt of the novel, which you can read here.

They also did an interview with me about ambition, creativity, and the California dream. Check it out here.

Thank you so much, Alta!

For Literary Hub, I wrote an essay called All in the Timing: On Publishing a Novel Nine Years After Giving Up on It. It’s the publishing story of my novel, Right Back Where We Started From, which I finished way back in 2012.

Excerpt:

This May, my first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, will be published nine years after I gave up and put it in a drawer. It’s not that I didn’t believe in the book, which I’d labored on for much of the aughts. While writing, I poured my fear of failure into the novel, as well as questions about success: Why does American ambition, which turns so many people into workaholics, seem both poisonous and attractive to me? Where does my constant urge to work come from? Every day I struggled with discouragement, yet I put off life events, like having a child, to write a book. I put off spending time with friends. I set aside other creative projects and spent years looking at the same story from every angle. By the time I finished the book in 2012, the emotional investment was deep.

Read the rest here.

So happy to have Right Back Where We Started From included in a spring literature round-up in The North Bay Business Journal!

Check out Turn the Page with New Books by Local Writers.

Here is my keynote for the Southern California Writers’ Conference! I tell the publishing story of my novel, Right Back Where We Started From, and lessons I learned along the way.

This Sunday, Valentine’s Day, I’m giving a keynote speech at the Southern California Writers’ Conference. It’ll be streaming on Zoom, for free. Tune in and listen at 4:30 PM (PST) on February 14th.

I’ll be telling the crazy story of Right Back Where I Started From, and how it was waylaid from publication in 2013 because of hurricanes and a school shooting. It should be fun. I hope you can make it.

LINK TO THE TALK
Meeting ID: 930 4826 0655
Passcode: 449387

This link will be live a little bit before the talk.

In the meantime, here’s more information about Southern California Writers’ Conference.

There are still slots open for all three days, including virtual keynote speeches from thriller-writer Dennis K. Crosby and Isla Morley, whose novel The Last Blue is about the blue-skinned people of Kentucky. Plus lots of craft workshops on everything from writing car chases to infusing micro-tension in your story to writing a memoir. Fun!

The book cover of RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM is here!

Coming May 4, 2021!

PREORDER:

Contact Me

I can FINALLY announce that my first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing in 2021. Ahhhhhhh!

I looked down at my hand while I was line editing and had to chuckle. I look like I’ve had an injury, but in fact the three band-aids I have on are to protect my fingers from writing calluses. Who says editing a book isn’t physically taxing?

“Of course any novelist has difficulties. I don’t have ‘blocks,’ I mean I don’t get into a state where absolutely nothing can be done for weeks; I can always do something, though the something that I do may have to be revised later on… I think the thing to do is to make one’s unconscious mind work for one. When there’s a problem, and suddenly you get a sort of knot in the procedure, where you want to do two things that are incompatible, for instance, or when you can’t really see what a character is like — there’s a sort of blank slate where the character ought to be — then you must meditate upon the problem, set it, as it were, as a problem to your unconscious mind, and hope that suddenly some creative flash will arrive. And that is a time that requires very great patience.” — Iris Murdoch, The Threepenny Review, 1984