Dear friends — Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I’m taking a look back over my various attempts at writing novels on Medium, and here is the first part of that essay:

Why I write novels

This week I’m junking the “about” in my title and getting right to the question of why I keep on trying to write… not just poems… not just flash fiction… but this crazy long form called a “novel.”

Pretend Plumber (which is launching in 10 days) is my second novel. No wait, actually it’s my third. I tried to write my first novel more than 20 years ago. I finished it with the support of my fiction teacher at UCLA — the now famous crime fiction author Tod Goldberg, and then . . .I sent it out and sent it out and never placed it. An agent even looked at it and sent a snail mail, with a regretful “no.” After an agonizing 6 months or so, my husband Larry took me out for expensive cocktails at a Beverly Hills hotel, in order to deliver the bad news to me that I was never going to find a publisher for this novel, because it was brilliant, but most people were not going to be able to deal with its speculative, cyber-punk, pansexual, dystopian, multilingual craziness. It’s an insane book, but I still feel that it’s got great stuff in it, including: vintage clothes as a way to escape government surveillance, a reality tv show about the White House, Neo-Nazis holding forth in Welsh in Anaheim, and hot air ballooning through Southern California.

You can the rest of that piece here. It’s a good one!