I wrote a short piece for VCU’s blog about writing that first novel. The bottom line as I see it is that the path to that “first novel” can be long and winding, and is rarely straightforward:
“After much querying, I found a great agent for that book, and she sent it out to everyone and then some. In exchange, I received a lot of nice rejection letters from editors. That book was never published, and probably rightfully so.”
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Be sure to check out “Grammar School,” a poem by Brandel France de Bravo, just posted on Redux:
America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of the twenty-four
frames per second as bottomless, open as the holes in our desks
where the ink bottles weren’t, like the cloakroom without cloaks—just
parkas and yellow raincoats. Hands perpetually raised, the smell
of mimeographs redolent as our mothers’ perfume, violet fingers
quivering in the air....
