This post was originally sent to my TinyLetter subscribers.
Exciting news, y’all: The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
This is ebook only; I’ll let you know as soon as the paperback is ready.
The official release date is May 22, 2018, one year minus one day after The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1 released, because books release on Tuesdays.
I hope you enjoy the second volume. It was a lot harder to write than the first volume, in part because adult lives don’t have the same linear forward motion as child and adolescent lives. There are stops and starts and circles, and way too many opportunities to repeat the same mistakes until you learn and grow beyond them.
But thank goodness we do keep learning and growing. ❤
(I was reading Kim Fu’s The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore this weekend — highly recommended, btw — and there’s a section of the book that deals with a young woman trying to carve out an artistic career in Los Angeles, and I was like “Wait a minute, I did that. I remember doing all of that, and now it feels like something I did when I was younger and more foolish and in some ways more open, because I was ready to take whatever seedy success came my way.”)
Here are a few other items of note:
It’s been just about a month since The Billfold switched to a Patreon-funded model, and we’re getting closer to our second Patreon goal. If you are one of our Patreon supporters, THANK YOU.
If you are writing your own novel and you’d like an editorial eye, I have some open time on my schedule for the next few months and I’d love to work with you. Here’s how to set that up.
If you’re looking for something to read on the internet, I can’t stop thinking about Edith Zimmerman’s My First Year Sober. I’ve never been a super-heavy drinker, but over the past six months or so I’ve sort of… stopped? It’s not that I never drink, because I had a finger of bourbon at Christmas and sipped on a glass of wine at a dinner in January, but it’s more like the experiences of 1) being tipsy and 2) being tired and fuzzy-headed the next day aren’t experiences I want to have — and see, now I’m going to start sounding like Edith does in her essay, the whole “I feel so much HEALTHIER” thing that she admits is annoying, but the essay is brilliant and also it has ILLUSTRATIONS, so go read it.
And pre-order The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2 if you want. Thank you. ❤