Melissa and I are thrilled to be blogging for the Book Passage website in anticipation of our visit to the store this Saturday along with authors Anna David, Stacey Ballis, and Zach Udko, for the launch of our new anthology Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men. It's been a remarkable journey for us over the past year and a half, and we can't believe that our book is about to be in stores!
We're both primarily novelists (she is finishing up one of her YA novels tonight before jumping on a plane to SF tomorrow), so it was a challenge for us figuring out how to hone and shape 29 different voices into a coherent narrative about the friendships and relationships between gay men and straight women. With fiction, you can edit a story, and you can take out characters or events or dialogue, but with nonfiction, you can't really do that (unless you're James Frey). So how do you tell an essayist that part of his or her personal story is, well, less interesting than other parts of it? How do you tell someone, "Can you take out the part about your sister, because it's not that exciting, and focus more on your mother?"
Our simple answer: Very, very carefully.
Nearly to a one, though, our authors were fantastic in terms of taking criticism, and many of the pieces went through 8-10 different passes. We're incredibly proud of the result, and the reviews have been great so far (even from those publications that are known to be -- hmmm...shall we say, a little cranky?).
We also received a nice little shout-out in Leah Garchik's column in the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday:
Armistead Maupin reveals in a Publishers Weekly interview with San Francisco writer Kemble Scott that he and his partner, Chris Turner, got married in Vancouver, Canada, in February....Maupin, whose "Michael Tolliver Lives'' will be out next month, is also author of the foreword to "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men,'' edited by Melissa de la Cruz and Tom Dolby. A portion of the profits go to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that helps gay teens.
Anyway, Melissa and I will blog as much as we can over the next week (believe it or not, being on a book tour takes up most of your time during the day, even when you're not doing readings!). Thanks, Book Passage, for giving us a voice for our ramblings! (aside from our own Girls Who Like Boys... site, of course -- check it out, but buy the book from Book Passage!)
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