My second book was published a few weeks ago now. North of Boston, originally titled "I can't come to the phone right now" after my blog is a book of short stories. That is the simple description. But it is more then that. It is a book of dreams and moments. Nightmares and might have beens. I used my friend's Facebook status updates to inspire my writing every day for nearly a year. And what I found, in myself, was that I need to write. If I don't something eats at my insides.
When my first book came out it was easy to distance myself from it...I wrote it years ago, it was fiction and so even if a character here or there was loosely based on someone no one would ever know. But North of Boston is something else entirely. And so with the accomplishment of having had it accepted for publication, came the fear that somehow I would be found out. What if my father-in-law recognized himself in a story and didn't like it? What if my best friend from my youth assumed something was about her? What if my husband (or ex-husband) didn't like what I had written?
When you write, fiction or otherwise, you put a piece of yourself on paper. And when you publish you take that piece of paper and share it with everyone you know, and the people you don't. North of Boston isn't just a book of short stories. It is a collection of snapshots of a life, some real and some imagined. All viewed in the moment, without the perspective of past or future events. Without the hope that things might get better on the next page.
