Contemporaneous: Chapters’ 2 & 3
2. “How was your day?” she asks me. I hate this question, although not because she asks it (although she knows how I dislike the question), but because my day was like the day before it, and the one before that, and the one before that. You get the idea. If anything different were to happen, anything spectacular, anything worthy of mentioning, then I’d mention it, but working as an editor in a small publisher doesn’t exactly offer the excitement of, say, working in the bomb squad. “The usual,” I tell her. I know she hates that answer because she’s a sharer. She’ll detail everything that happens throughout her day…
August Falling: The Inception
While I was doing the Hachette Manuscript Development Program, then-Hachette publisher Bernadette Foley asked me to think about where my book fit in the market. As research to that question, I asked some of the other participants if they’d read similar books to my own. The wonderful Kim Lock made a number of suggestions, including one popular novel. I bought a swath of books with the intent of seeing how they related to Just Another Week in Suburbia. That was the summer I house-sat my friend’s house to dog-sit their dog, Jet, so I could work on the revision of Just Another Week in Suburbia. While I was off from…