🔒 Happy NaNoWriMo!
🔒 Happy NaNoWriMo!
The first page of my book, because why not?
To celebrate the first day of NaNoWriMo and to help promote TextSpark’s novel writing contest, I’m taking a little break from advice on the free newsletter this week.
This is the first page of my book. It’s loosely based on my own life, but really, the best way to describe it is fiction.
It’s my chick lit ode to San Francisco, unabashedly through rose-tinted glasses.
For some of us, there’s that great dream of New York City. For others, there’s the enduring myth of the Bay Area. As you’re reading, I hope what it conjures is more Bridget Jones, and less Uncanny Valley.
When people ask me why I love San Francisco, I can never give them a straight answer. I don’t think I’ve visited a single museum or tourist attraction or even so much as eaten at a particularly good restaurant. There’s just something about it that makes me love it.
Every now and then, I’ll take a flight from Austin to San Francisco. Since I got married, I’ve done it three times. Four- or five-day trips, usually composed of just walking around the city and returning home. I’ll take a few days off work, crash with my cousin who lives in the Mission, and just wander.
This is my fourth visit, for the first time not just because I felt like it, but because I got a job at a startup.
I’m still writing tweets, but for more money, and for something that feels a little more meaningful than Big Corporations who’ll monopolize eight weeks on 140-characters of lip service to social justice.
I think my favorite thing about San Francisco is that I’m able to wander at all. I can go wherever I want to. It’s a small city, but it doesn’t feel small. Nothing feels small here, and everything feels possible. Maybe not for me, but for someone.
Sometimes this feeling of possibility makes me uncomfortable. It feels like a city that I’ll never really get to know. It just seems too incongruent with where I’m going and too distant to ever be experienced in a real way. Have you ever liked something so much that it gives you nightmares?