Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote about gothic horror, Shirley Jackson, and California Victorians:

RIGHT BEFORE SHIRLEY JACKSON began working on her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, a postcard depicting a California mansion started bothering her. “It was an ugly house,” she wrote. “[A]ll angles and all wrong. It was sick, diseased.” She wrote to her mother, who still lived near San Francisco where Jackson grew up, and asked if she knew anything about it. Her mother replied that her “great-grandfather had built it. She remembered when the people of the town got together one night and burned it down.” Soon, Jackson was at work on the best haunted house novel I’ve read.

More here.

I was on the radio on The 21st Show in Illinois, talking about workaholism. Listen here to
Were You Productive During The Pandemic?

I read an excerpt of my novel, RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM, today on KALW’s New Arrivals Podcast. Listen here!

I was interviewed about RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM on C. P. Lesley’s Blog. She asked a lot of in-depth questions about the plot, so you can get my inside take on the characters. Read it here.

My book has a book trailer! MARCIA made it for me! She is the best!

The Petaluma Argus-Courier interviewed me about Right Back Where We Started From! Check out: Longtime Petaluma journalist debuts first novel

Check out this illustration of me in the Spring 2021 issue of Alta!

So happy to have contributed to The Curious Reader by Mental Floss!

It’s full of facts about authors and their books, from Jane Austen to JRR Tolkien. From the publisher:

Readers rejoice From Mental Floss, an online destination for more than a billion curious minds since its founding in 2001, comes the ultimate book for lovers of literature. From Americanah to War and Peace, from Chinua Achebe and Jane Austen to Jesamyn Ward and George R.R. Martin, learn surprising facts about the world’s most famous novels and novelists.

Really interesting to peruse and easy to digest. Read more about The Curious Reader here.

I’m writing this on June 8th. Right Back Where We Started From came out on May 4th. It has been over a month now, and I can finally breathe a little after this whirlwind. Promoting and publishing a debut novel is intense.

One of the best experiences so far was the moment writers always dream about, when you open the box from your publisher and pull out the book. It was quite surreal. Here are a couple of pictures of me holding my book for the first time:

Note the painting I’m sitting under. It’s by the artist M. Maxwell. Kyle and I bought the painting years ago because it reminded us of Vira, the grandmother in Right Back Where We Started From. It seemed appropriate to be sitting under her severe gaze while pulling out the book for the first time.

These storyboards have been kicking around my office for 9 years now. I used them to structure my novel, Right Back Where We Started From. I’ve often considered throwing the boards out, but never did. For a long time it seemed like my book wasn’t going to be published, so the storyboards became the only physical evidence that the novel exists. (If you want to read why my book, which I finished in 2012, is coming out now in 2021, check out my essay in LitHub.)

Right Back Where We Started From is a multi-generational saga that weaves through time, starting in the California Gold Rush with stops in World War II San Francisco, 1906 Healdsburg, and 1930s Hollywood, among others. I used the storyboards to figure out the order of the chapters.

For each draft, I’d print a list of scenes, cut them out, lay them on the floor, and move them around until I had an order I thought might work. Then I’d tape them to the boards as a guide to edit the book. As I finished each scene, I gave myself a sticker, much the way a third-grade teacher would reward a student who did well on a test. Earning the sticker meant I could move on to the next scene. I did this over and over until it was no longer necessary to move the scenes around, and the structure was set.

Now that my book is out in the world, a physical object that I can look at, I don’t need the storyboards anymore. But I wanted to write a blog post about them anyway. They’re like old friends that offered support when I needed it the most.