No, it’s not me getting divorced; in fact, as of this month I’ve been married for seven years and drummer dude and I have been together for thirteen years (yes, thirteen! we were a mere twelve years old when we met, just two kids with a dream…). Actually, I think I want to divorce Slanted and Enchanted. The dear thing was published a year ago this month, and things didn’t work out as we’d expected. We were young and naive when our time together began almost four years ago; I nurtured it from a small article into a sort of big book, we signed contracts, we started a bank account, we did taxes together. I have it to thank for the first year I was ever able to deduct writing related expenses, because it was the first (and thus far, the only) year my writing ever brought in an income. And then stuff went wrong. The publisher thought we could handle things on our own, and I mean everything; then people got laid off from the publisher, people quit the publisher, the publisher fought Amazon, more people got laid off, and so on. And we were not good on our own because I was tired of the thing, to be honest. While touring and reading from it was fun, other aspects of life together were nothing but a gigantic pain in the ass.

I started working on a new book last September, which is in limbo for now, but from the beginning I found it a lot more attractive and enticing than the old bag. It also shook up my writing in what I think is a good way; maybe this is dumb to admit, but I think it might actually be… good. Interesting to me, anyway. I always tell my students not to fall in love with something they’re working on lest it fail in some way, but teachers never follow our own advice.

So I have a new project. And some other things I’m keeping on the mental back burner. And maybe some of you other writers can relate to this, but I’m not the same person I was when I wrote S&E; in fact, I’m not even the same writer. And the book before that? Even more alien. It’s like when exes of years and years ago find you on Facebook and you look at the friend request and think, “why? Don’t you remember we broke up for a reason?”

I wish you well, little books I wrote. Someday I might even find you interesting again.

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