So the first draft of my new novel has been delivered to my editor! The last few weeks have been totally exhausting and I am so glad that I have some time before I’ll need to look at the manuscript again.

The process was not easy (and it’s far from over). But it was also really interesting. I’ve never written fiction before. A lot of people said that fiction would be easier than memoir—after all, you can make up whatever you want in fiction. But for me, that made it even harder. I had to come up with everything—every place, every name, every emotion. When I wrote I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, I knew the story. I knew the characters. I knew the emotions. Because I lived it all. The hardest part was figuring out how to tell the story (as opposed to figuring out what the story was).

This novel has been years in the works. It was probably sometime in late 2006 that I first got the idea. And it came from such a random place. I was in a meeting and a coworker said something like “Wow. That would be a crazy place to live.” I don’t even remember what he said, but the first thing I thought of was that it would be weird to live across the street from a cemetery. And later, I thought it’d be even weirder to live across the street from a cemetery if someone you cared about were buried there. Then this little idea came to be a bigger idea. What if a teenage girl’s boyfriend suddenly died and was buried outside of her window? At first I thought that I would make it about really lovely relationship, but soon realized (or was it my editor who told me?) that happy relationships are boring (to write or read about anyway). And then my brilliant editor had the idea to make the boyfriend already dead on page one. And so it went… (Only now, the cemetery is a few blocks from her house. It seemed like overkill to have it be right out her window.)

This may seem so obvious to everyone, but I was shocked at how much of my own personal life I could work into the book. I would love to do some sort of annotated manuscript or interactive website where you could click on a part of the book and it would tell you the real story behind the inspiration. For starters, the cemetery that the book takes place in is in my parents’ neighborhood. The dead boyfriend is made up of bits and pieces of people I’ve dated. An important photo that the main characters references a few times is based on an actual photo of me as a baby. Names of people in the book are based on people in my family. Even the ending is completely based on something that happened to me when I was about 17. Or at least it’s based on what I remember 13 years later.

More to come once I get comments from my editor!