I Turned in My Book

On letting go of the project and fulfilling a lifelong dream

To all of my subscribers: thank you for hanging in there. I’m back! Huge thanks to my paying subscribers who haven’t left. I appreciate you so much.

For the past three weeks, I’ve worked twelve hour days on my final revisions. If all goes well, HOTSHOT will be published next summer.

Me with the hotshots on a fire in Oregon, July 2002. I was twenty-one years old.

I’ve been working on this book for five years.

I started working on the proposal while I was working 50 hours a week as a nanny in Seattle. I’ll never forget waking up at 5am and driving to the coffee shop near my nanny house, eking out two hours of work before starting my day caring for two infants, then working at my favorite coffee shop (Hello Analog Coffee!) on the weekends. I had no idea if the proposal would sell, but it did. I spoke to my editor at Grove Press while holding a baby on my hip. I barely had a moment to stop and celebrate.

Here are all the things that happened between the time I sold my book (May 2019) and no…