Opening My Book!

Filed under: Books,Fiction,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 1:34 pm on Tuesday, June 8, 2021

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:

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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: Interviews and Excerpt of Right Back Where We Started From

Filed under: Books,Fiction,Interviews,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 12:11 pm on Tuesday, June 8, 2021

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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!

LitHub Essay: All in the Timing

Filed under: Books,Essays,Fiction,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 11:29 am on Tuesday, June 8, 2021

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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.

North Bay Business Journal Interview!

Filed under: Books,Fiction,Interviews,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 8:20 am on Saturday, April 17, 2021

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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.

Watch My Keynote!

Filed under: Books,Events/Talks,Fiction,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 7:39 am on Saturday, April 17, 2021

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.

Keynote Speech At Southern California Writers’ Conference

Filed under: Books,Events/Talks,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 8:01 am on Tuesday, February 9, 2021

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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!

RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM COVER REVEAL

Filed under: Books,Fiction,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 1:09 pm on Monday, November 9, 2020

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

Coming May 4, 2021!

PREORDER:

INDIEBOUND * AMAZON * BARNES AND NOBLE * BOOKS-A-MILLION * HUDSON * TARGET * WALMART
AUDIBLE

PRAISE:

In Right Back Where We Started From Joy Lanzendorfer has crafted a terrific first novel, one brimming with energy, wit, and emotional resonance. Sandra Sanborn is a wonderful character, very much alive on the page. The novel captures, vividly, some of the crazier times in California’s crazy history. Highly recommended!

Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others

Joy Lazendorfer’s thrill of a novel, Right Back Where We Started From, tells the story of an engaging young woman, eager to be discovered in 1930s Hollywood. But as she looks to the future, a letter from a man who claims to be her father, pulls her to the unknown past. This is a novel of California dreaming, from the Gold Rush to the Hollywood Hills. Lazendorfer writes with charm, style and great energy.

Ellen Sussman, New York Times bestselling author of four novels, A Wedding in Provence, The Paradise Guest House, French Lessons and On a Night Like This.

From the California Gold Rush to the to the San Francisco earthquake, through the Great Depression and World War II, Joy Lanzendorfer artfully weaves a beautifully textured saga. Yearnings, secrets, and shame shape the lives of three generations of American women as they dare to question the rigid societal expectations that confine them to proscribed roles and stifle ambition. Gripping prose and complex and memorable characters make this shining debut novel a pleasure to read.

Liza Nash Taylor, author of Etiquette for Runaways and the forthcoming In All Good Faith.

SUMMARY:

If misfortune hadn’t gotten in the way, Sandra Sanborn would be where she belongs—among the rich and the privileged instead of standing outside a Hollywood studio wearing a sandwich board in hopes of someone discovering her. It’s tough breaking into movies during the Great Depression, but Sandra knows that she’s destined for greatness. After all, her grandmother Vira crossed the country during the Gold Rush and established the Sanborns as one of San Francisco’s prominent families, and her mother Mabel grew up in a lavish mansion and married a wealthy rancher. Success, Sandra feels, is in her blood. All she needs is a chance to prove it.

In between failed auditions, Sandra receives a letter from a man claiming to be her real father, which calls into question everything she believes about her family history—and herself. As she tries to climb the social ladder, family secrets lurk in the background, pulling her back down. Until Sandra confronts the truth about how Vira and Mabel gained and lost their fortunes, she’ll always end up right back where she started from.

Right Back Where We Started From is a sweeping, multigenerational work of fiction that explores the lust for ambition that entered into the American consciousness during the Gold Rush and how it affected our nation’s ideas of success, failure, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s a meticulously layered saga—at once historically rich, romantic, and suspenseful—about three determined and completely unforgettable women.

***

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NOVEL COMING IN 2021

Filed under: Books,Fiction,Joy's Work,Novel,RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM — Administrator at 4:28 pm on Tuesday, November 26, 2019

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

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Suiting Up For Battle

Filed under: Novel,Writing and Publishing — Administrator at 7:19 am on Monday, March 2, 2015

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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?

But I’m Not Patient…

Filed under: Novel,Writing and Publishing — joy at 11:49 am on Friday, February 13, 2009

“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

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