What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I probably began writing it in the summer of 2008. That’s when I found out my job that had supported me in NYC was being shipped overseas.
Since I didn’t know when, if ever, I would be able to live in this essential place for me again, I began wandering the city, much like my protagonist, and visiting every corner, every street that had meaning, and memorizing everything. That’s when the germ of the novel came to my mind. I wanted a place where I could put my love of that city and my impending loss of it.
Over the following years after getting feedback I added a second story line that supported the first. Then I won a Pushcart Prize for an essay about the time I got my draft finalized and got a top agent. This would’ve been in 2014, and I thought my book was shooting through the gap.
Click on the below link to purchase The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses 2014 which Steve Adams’s Pulitzer Prize winning essay “Touch”
But no one picked it up immediately, and my agent and I parted ways. I carry no bitterness about this; she was a lovely person and gave it a shot, though there was crushing disappointment in my book not landing. Still, I couldn’t give up on it. After a year or so I read it again, still loved and believed in it, and sent it out to a couple places. After it didn’t hit again I had to put it away for awhile. But I still couldn’t leave it alone, so every year I’d do a light revision, then send it to one or two places, put it away, then try again.
I was totally surprised when it landed at The University of Wisconsin Press. They’re big for a university press and respected. And I suspect the years since I began have actually made the book more attractive now since it’s more clearly a period piece, and it did have those extra years of revisions. I don’t have the exact date when I finished my final published draft, but it would’ve been, summer of 2022. I did make one simple but substantive change after my press picked it up, which improved it.
Click on the below link to purchase REMEMBER THIS from The University of Wisconsin Press.
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5927.htm
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I generally work in coffeeshops and sometimes in quiet bars in the afternoon/early evening. I like the white noise of the chatter of voices. (as long as no one’s talking in my ear or on a cellphone next to me) Here’s a picture of the Starbucks where I wrote in Arlington Texas, and a second one of me in my chair.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? These days I write on a laptop but I used to write longhand, then transfer it over. I believe in regularity as much as possible and as a writing coach I try to encourage people to find a time of day that works for them and stick to it. I’ve been doing this so long it’s pretty easy for me to shift into a creative state, but for the most part I hit it in the afternoons, about 4 or 5, after I’ve taken care of my clients. Then my mainstay is to hit a coffee shop and get a cup of green tea. I also believe in giving yourself some sort of treat, but one that repeats. I believe after a time the creative part of you associates the treat’s specific flavor with writing and kicks in easier, and also that little dose of caffeine is a lift without being so strong it keeps you awake at night. Sometimes when I’m having to bust through a tough scene, or charging to the end of someone’s project as an editor, I’ll throw in an espresso too.
Click on the below link to visit the Steve Adams’s website
https://www.steveadamswriting.com/
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. This is from page 34.
I raised my glass in the amber light of the restaurant where the beautiful art people went, where Robert Mapplethorpe was publicly dying of AIDS. I wondered how many other people in this room it would kill within the year. I wondered if anyone here would catch it this night. In my wine-glass the amber light had penetrated the dark red wine and hovered, in a golden parabola, at its center. It arced and trembled in my hand. “To love,” I said.
“To love,” she answered.
Click on the below link to purchase REMMEBER THIS from Amazon
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? In it my protagonist, John, has the night before been told by the woman he’s in love with, his supervisor at his office and a married woman with a child, that the affair has to end. His good friend and confidante, Jennifer, has taken him out to eat in a beautiful restaurant to try and cheer him up. It’s 1988, NYC, and AIDS is everywhere. John is pondering all this, the mess he’s gotten himself into with this woman, the fact of the risks they’ve taken, and the risks that seem inherent in following one’s heart and desires, and especially the idea, finally, that life is not safe, and neither is love; AIDS, which is part of the NYC landscape, is only an extreme example of this. Those ideas swirling about made this a particularly emotional scene to write, also because I feel my characters’ emotions as I write them. I was living in NYC at this time, so I really felt it. I wanted to boil down the ideas of love and desire and death and loss into one image, and came up with a golden light trembling at the center of a deep red darkness (I’ve actually seen this effect in a glass of wine). And then, in spite of it all, or maybe because of it all, John toasts love, and Jennifer echoes him.
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html