When I first discovered Hillary Raphael, the force behind Future Fiction London, my heart had just been pulverized and I was sort of limping along, all bereft, renting a room from this feisty Irish widow in Ealing, West London. I was spending a lot of time in the local library & somehow I came across Hillary's third novel Ximena. Of course, it turned out to be exactly what I needed to read (this always happens, no? You stumble upon a certain book and it's so relevant and/or a salve.)
Ximena rocked - it was so clever and devious and wicked - and I proceeded to order and devour every book Hillary Raphael had ever written. Her first book, I Love Lord Buddha was easily the most exciting fiction I'd read in long, long time. & Backpacker!
She quickly became my hero & I searched all over the internet for her: (Anthem interview) (3AM interview) (Defiled Curator) (Suicide Girls) (Daily Candy) (Hillary's Neo Geisha site.) The more I read, the more I worshipped her.
So much so, that even though I'd never written a fan letter to an author or movie star or anyone before in my life, I wrote to Hillary. And she wrote back. & so we struck up a brief correspondence. I mentioned something to her about my most recent disastrous love affair, and she suggested I fictionalize it, along the lines of Justine Levy's Rein de Grave/Nothing Serious (and here.)
At the time, I thought, no way, I could never do that. It's not my style (well, mostly I didn't think I had the guts to write it.) I didn't want to revisit what was a truly devastating and horrific experience. But I didn't say that to Hillary, I just said, yea, maybe I will. Hillary urged me to stay in touch, and if I did get anywhere with the book, to send it along to Future Fiction as maybe she would be interested in publishing it.
Well, three years passed. I spent the first scraping along in London, mostly doing the essay editing I do to make money - I did very little writing, except for maybe an hour very very early in the morning, when it was still dark out. This is when I first started toying around with the early pages that would become Sherry & Narcotics.
The second year I determined to nail my first book, a different project mostly set in LA called I'm Not This Girl - I'd been working on it for ages with this schwanky London agent (who also happened to be very sexy) but I could not seem to get the damn thing right. I wrote so many drafts I forgot what the book was supposed to be about in the first place. It turned out to be one of the most frustrating and heartbreaking experiences (I'm sure it was for this agent too - I wanted so badly for it to work out, and not just because I had a huge crush on him!)
Finally, in Aug 2009, I turned in what I hoped would be the definitive draft of I'm Not This Girl - the one that my agent would deem ready to go out to publishers - the one that would bring me fame & fortune! Alas, it was not be. The word was, he was 'gutted' - the book still wasn't there yet - would it ever be?!
Thoroughly discouraged, I packed it in and returned to New York City, where I took a proper job and set out to pay off three years' worth of unpaid student loans & taxes (I half expected some sort of debtor's police to meet me at the airport when I landed on US soil.)
I lasted maybe 4 or 5 months of not thinking of myself as a writer. By February I was starting to lose it & started waking up at the crack of dawn again to write before I went in to work. This time I decided to set I'm Not This Girl aside, and I began writing Sherry & Narcotics in earnest. The book pretty much wrote itself - I started in March and it was done by the end of August. I sent it to Hillary at Future Fiction and she loved it. The rest is history.
I can't even begin to describe how cool it is to be published by a woman-owned publisher - run by someone like Hillary, who was my idol before I ever even knew she had this company Future Fiction. It also doesn't hurt that she is way smarter than me, and much more of a badass than I could ever dream of being:-)
Ximena rocked - it was so clever and devious and wicked - and I proceeded to order and devour every book Hillary Raphael had ever written. Her first book, I Love Lord Buddha was easily the most exciting fiction I'd read in long, long time. & Backpacker!
She quickly became my hero & I searched all over the internet for her: (Anthem interview) (3AM interview) (Defiled Curator) (Suicide Girls) (Daily Candy) (Hillary's Neo Geisha site.) The more I read, the more I worshipped her.
So much so, that even though I'd never written a fan letter to an author or movie star or anyone before in my life, I wrote to Hillary. And she wrote back. & so we struck up a brief correspondence. I mentioned something to her about my most recent disastrous love affair, and she suggested I fictionalize it, along the lines of Justine Levy's Rein de Grave/Nothing Serious (and here.)
At the time, I thought, no way, I could never do that. It's not my style (well, mostly I didn't think I had the guts to write it.) I didn't want to revisit what was a truly devastating and horrific experience. But I didn't say that to Hillary, I just said, yea, maybe I will. Hillary urged me to stay in touch, and if I did get anywhere with the book, to send it along to Future Fiction as maybe she would be interested in publishing it.
Well, three years passed. I spent the first scraping along in London, mostly doing the essay editing I do to make money - I did very little writing, except for maybe an hour very very early in the morning, when it was still dark out. This is when I first started toying around with the early pages that would become Sherry & Narcotics.
The second year I determined to nail my first book, a different project mostly set in LA called I'm Not This Girl - I'd been working on it for ages with this schwanky London agent (who also happened to be very sexy) but I could not seem to get the damn thing right. I wrote so many drafts I forgot what the book was supposed to be about in the first place. It turned out to be one of the most frustrating and heartbreaking experiences (I'm sure it was for this agent too - I wanted so badly for it to work out, and not just because I had a huge crush on him!)
Finally, in Aug 2009, I turned in what I hoped would be the definitive draft of I'm Not This Girl - the one that my agent would deem ready to go out to publishers - the one that would bring me fame & fortune! Alas, it was not be. The word was, he was 'gutted' - the book still wasn't there yet - would it ever be?!
Thoroughly discouraged, I packed it in and returned to New York City, where I took a proper job and set out to pay off three years' worth of unpaid student loans & taxes (I half expected some sort of debtor's police to meet me at the airport when I landed on US soil.)
I lasted maybe 4 or 5 months of not thinking of myself as a writer. By February I was starting to lose it & started waking up at the crack of dawn again to write before I went in to work. This time I decided to set I'm Not This Girl aside, and I began writing Sherry & Narcotics in earnest. The book pretty much wrote itself - I started in March and it was done by the end of August. I sent it to Hillary at Future Fiction and she loved it. The rest is history.
I can't even begin to describe how cool it is to be published by a woman-owned publisher - run by someone like Hillary, who was my idol before I ever even knew she had this company Future Fiction. It also doesn't hurt that she is way smarter than me, and much more of a badass than I could ever dream of being:-)
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