I’m working on a relentlessly bleak and terminally sad novel set in late 19th-century northern Quebec. Some days it goes okay and some days it doesn’t.
Robert Olmstead
As for what’s on my desk, seeds of both a second novel and a sesame bagel I ate weeks ago, a yoga class schedule I have never consulted, discarded pages of the screenplay adaptation of my first novel, The Quality of Life Report. Note to screenwriters: when you get to page 163, move the wastebasket closer.
Meghan Daum
I’m about two-thirds through a first draft of a novel about a woman who’s waiting for her husband to get out of prison. He’s doing twenty-five-to-life for second-degree murder, and the book follows her from his arrest to the moment she feels he’s really back home with her and the two of them are truly together again. So in a way it’s a romance that also follows her necessary and difficult movement from innocence to experience. Unlike prison life itself, which attracts tons of media coverage, being a family member on the outside is a hidden world, and because of that, I think the book has a large non-fiction component, realistically laying out for the reader what it’s like. So I’m doing...
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