I’m not sure what I like more, having a book out or having the opportunity to create a playlist for it. Many thanks to Largehearted Boy, a.k.a. David Gutowski, for hosting my song list on his beautiful site!
Today is the official publication day for Deep Roots, my fourth novel. Friends and family have told me they have already received their pre-ordered copies over the weekend, so I guess the publication day is actually kind of useless. But hey, it’s still the official day, and it got me in a thinking mood, or more accurately, a calculating mood:
14 years 4 novels 1,249 pages 360,726 words
That’s my career so far as a novelist, in strictly numerical terms. The word count is suspect, of course, since I used Microsoft Word’s Word Count feature from the final drafts and added them up. But what’s a few hundred words here and there?
audiobooks will be made of both Deep Roots and Skin Deep
I’m quite excited about #2. The actress Jennifer Sun Bell will be narrating; she read Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires, so I’m fortunate to have such a professional lending her voice. The audiobooks will be widely available (via OrangeSky Audio, a subsidiary of Spotify) next month.
Three days until the book’s pub date, though I have heard from some people that they already have it in their hands. Hearty thank you to the kind folks at Booklist who reviewed (and liked!) Deep Roots. Full review below.
My second mystery novel is due out in less than a week! To celebrate its publication, I’ll be putting out some content, such as this one.
In case you aren’t familiar with My Book, The Movie, it’s a blog that lets you pretend cast your book if it were made into a movie. Three years ago, I did it for Skin Deep, too. Anyway — enjoy!
Thanks to CrimeReads for featuring an essay on my journey to writing Skin Deep.
One of my greatest thrills as a college student was when I was let into the intermediate-level creative writing workshop. You couldn’t just sign up and walk in—you had to submit a short story good enough for the professor to deem you worthy. That first day, I sat around the rectangular table with my future colleagues and was handed a set of rules for the class. It’s been almost thirty years since I laid eyes on this single xeroxed sheet, but I can still remember one of them: You will not write stories about serial murderers, or even regular murderers.
At My Book, the Movie, I dream up the perfect cast for the film adaptation of Skin Deep. Please, if you have Awkwafina’s and Cate Blanchett’s phone numbers, give them a ring for me.
There’s a file on my computer with the title MYSTIDEA.TXT. It’s dated 4/27/1993. If someone were to ask me the exact date when I started this book, that’s the date.
There’s another file on my computer titled CH1 — no extension. Not sure how that happened, but the file loads just fine. At the top of that file is another date: 7/16/93. If someone were to ask me the exact date when I wrote the first words of Skin Deep, that’s the date.
Granted, the end product bears little resemblance to my initial notions, but that’s how long it took.
Happy birthday, Skin Deep. That was a very long labor.
To celebrate your entry into the literary world, here’s one of your godparents:
Look for more godparents to drop by as the week progresses, until we celebrate you properly with your book launch.