I apologize for the lapse in blog postings. I’ve been so busy finishing my second novel (now officially titled CLEAN. Yay!), starting my third novel, going back to work on the edits for CLEAN, being ridiculously busy at my day job, plus trying to have some fun in the gorgeous Oakland summer. I feel like I have a lot to tell you, but I still can’t formulate my thoughts enough for a meaningful blog post. In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you something from the past.
“Under the Wall” is a short story I published in Fiction Magazine in 2006. I had already published a short non-fiction piece in the sadly retired Bay Area journal Kitchen Sink, but my good friend was one of the editors so it kind of felt like it didn’t count. Getting my first story published in such a prestigious journal as Fiction (I share the issue with Joyce Carol Oates, for cripes sake) pretty much blew my mind. I finally made it! I could now tell people I was a writer without feeling like a liar (not true, by the way. I still feel like I’m lying when I tell people I’m a writer, even with a novel published).
This story is also where BEAUTIFUL was born. You may recognize some passages in the story that I repeated verbatim in the novel. I realized quickly a short story was not enough to contain this story–it had to be a novel. This publication, in a roundabout way, is also what ended up landing me an agent. That’s a long story–perhaps a good subject for my next blog post?
I hope you like it.
xoxo
Amy
