You know what they say: every writer has a novel in a drawer somewhere that they mean to re write. I’m pretty sure they are correct.
In honor of NaNoWriMo – during which I’m actually trying to write my 3rd book, the trifecta in the series about my marriage – I thought I should dust off that old novel in my drawer and see if anyone was interested.
I’ve put up the first chapter on Patreon and will publish the 2nd, and so on, once I’m up to 90 patrons.
& Let me tell you: pulling it out and dusting it off – metaphorically, of course, since mine was an old .doc file – is pretty painful. It took me a long while to work out that my strength as a writer wasn’t fiction, and yet… the few people who read this novel back in the day seemed to think it was okay, including one very impressive agent.
It is about an angry young woman in her 20s who lives in NYC and who meets some people and sleeps with some and is trying to sort out her sexuality and her anger and friendship and loyalty, etc. It’s a coming of age novel, transparent to me now.
For me, in particular, it stands as a kind of love letter to a New York that no longer exists, or that only exists in the memories of the folks who were there, the NYC that reveals its own past selves in park lamp lights and ads for discontinued products and places fading on the sides of buildings. It’s a New York before cell phones and 9/11 and before a long line of Republican mayors. Some of my favorite places make an appearance: the Audubon Ballroom of Washington Heights, Cafe Reggio, and, of course, the statue of Joan of Arc hidden in Riverside Park at 93rd Street.