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Fourteen days.
In just fourteen days, The Lost Princess of Story will be published on Amazon.
Those days are going so fast.
I always like getting a little glimpse at the writer behind the book, so here’s a little background information about how I wrote The Lost Princess of Story.
I’ve done all kinds of writing over the years. Saw my words become movies and plays, wrote lots of publicity and reader’s reviews for agents and publishers of other people’s novels, wrote for newspapers, and assisted other writers with their books.
But I always wanted to write a novel.
I did, in fact, write many.
The first time I wrote a novel, I was in second grade. There is a belief that you must write a million words before you are ready to publish your first book, and I may have done that over the years. I have written quite a few novel. They would go in a bottom drawer, or in a box that got thrown into storage in one of my family’s many moves.
This story, the one about the World of Story, has lived with me for a long time. Pieces of it date to a book I wrote in high school. It’s current, Brooklyn-based form is about twenty years old. My son remembers years of Story bedtime stories.
But it took 2020, that epic dumpster fire of a year, for me to sit down and get it all on paper.
I live in New York City, and as I watched my world shut down around me, I wanted to get it all down on paper—the city I loved, the city that might never be the same. I had lived through 9/11, through Hurricane Sandy. We are resilient, New Yorkers. We would make it through.
But what would change?
I got COVID. In those early days, when to get a test my family had to wait on a long list, then drive out to Staten Island to a mobile testing site where National Guard with machine guns directed us to masked doctors who leaned in the car windows to shove swabs up our noses. It was like a dystopian novel.
Even before 2020, I dealt with chronic illness and pain. But COVID took me down hard. I have been blessed to have the doctors at Mount Sinai’s post-COVID center, but I have long-haul symptoms including heart damage.
There were a lot of months in bed.
That kind of thing makes you think. It makes you see life differently.
I always wanted to publish a novel. And in fourteen days, I am.
I don’t recommend it as best practices, writing in bed. But when I couldn’t do anything else, sometimes I could write. And edit. And a sentence, page, chapter and day at a time, it was an accomplishment when I really needed one.
I could not have written this book any other year except this past one.
There is a lot of 2020 in the book. Losing things and people you love. Learning to live with illness and disability. The things that break us, and change us, and make us stronger than we ever dreamed possible.
And how important it is to hold those we love close. How surprises, even miracles are everywhere, if we only look for them. How important books are.
Plus Brooklyn. And magic.
Fourteen days.
I can’t wait.
Your Fairy Bookmother,
Suzanne
Check me out on Facebook. Suzanne de Planque@ChroniclesofStory
