Thursday was such a spectacular day that I have to share it with you. I took the drive to Sydney to meet the staff at Simon & Schuster Australia, who are publishing Vivian Rising here in my new home this February. It’s my first launch here and I feel like a virgin at this business. So far it’s a dream. You will just die when you see their cover. It’s gorgeous, just like the people there that I have the amazing luck to work with…they even gave me one of those divine pigeons for the cover. How did they know how much I love that pigeon? And what kind of a sign was this divine rainbow (pictured) that formed in my path as I left their office?
novels
The role of place in fiction
Lately I’ve been pondering the importance and influence of place in fiction. When I first started out, I was living in New York City, a struggling journalist from unglamorous roots, making her way in the most glamorous scene in the world—making mistakes like drinking out of a brandy snifter and having no clue how to use a fish knife. Naturally, my fiction was inspired by this world. In my fiction, I’d tried to revisit the landscape of my childhood back then, but I hadn’t been ready to do so properly, and the draft I’d worked up felt forced and phony. I’d shelved even the topic—which, in essence a coming of age story, was certainly universal—for nearly six years before I revisited not so much the topic, but as I was to learn later, the important bit: the condensed feeling of the experience, in an abbreviated sense, in THE VELVET ROPE DIARIES. It was much easier to explore this landscape—both physically and emotionally—because I’d distanced myself from it, and this made all the difference. So, you see—distance from a place is one way you can impact your use of it.