In graduate school, I was trained (sort of) to write short stories. I didn’t read short stories, except in the New Yorker because it’s always lying around the house, and I was always confused by the idea of writing in this form––just as you get to know a character, the story is over. But occasionally, a story will come into my brain whole. It’s best when it’s an idea that’s like a truffle, intense, awesome but something you can’t imagine having a lot of. (Maybe the truffle comparison breaks down here. I can eat a lot of truffles.)

Anyway, I have a story idea in my mind right now, and as I’m waiting a few days to hear back from an editor on an idea I want to turn into my next book, I think I might just take a crack at it. Here’s what I’m thinking will be the opening line:

Ally, Jennifer, Kate and I were the only mothers in Classroom K-203 who took the subway into work after drop off. We started the kindergarten year bumping into one another on the platform, then waiting up when we’d see the other on the sidewalk outside school. Pretty soon we’d become a group. Except for Thursdays when Ally’s husband dropped off so she could get in early for a staff meeting, we’d meet up in the hall outside the classroom, walk together the two blocks to the F train, and talk the whole way into the city, hanging onto poles and straps as the F train labored from stop to stop, hestitating and jerking its way up ramps, into tunnels and faster and faster toward midtown where we all, the four of us, and sometimes we felt like we were the only ones––had jobs.

We talked and listened. This was before any of us had had coffee, but still, these conversations were wild, as if our lives depended on it.

….

Okay! Here I go…

May 11th––For the last month I’ve had the feeling that I had some big plan for this date but couldn’t recall it. And then I’d remember: Little Blog is officially released today, meaning you can go to a bookstore and buy it.

This was a little anticlimactic with Slipping, as most bookstores don’t carry a first novel–or at least, mine. That anticlimax was totally turned on its head when, over the next six months or so, a slow trickle of feedback began to arrive. Friends telling of trips to vacation spots where a little bookstore had stocked it, letters from family who had read it and reported weeping at certain parts that I imagine resonated particularly for those of us in my family. Internet reviews. Incredibly touching notes from kids written on three punch lined composition paper and signed in perfect cursive script.

I’m at the end of a year that for the first time ever, has been filled with writing. First I was working on Little Blog in the fall, then on the draft of a third novel I’m writing, then on book $4 for The Amanda Project series, which I am close to having a draft of. I don’t know what the world will make of Little Blog, if I’ll get the same kind of response as Slipping did, but I have that sweet, happy feeling I remember from the days right after both my kids were born.