Prompt: Brainstorm a list of people who haunt you. It can be people who haunt your thinking, writers you’ve never forgotten, characters you love from a book, friends you haven’t heard from in years or loved ones you’ve lost along the way. Then choose one specter and explore how they have infiltrated and shaped your life. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write.
I loved the novel, The Correspondent, and its break-out author, Virginia Evans, before I started listening to interviews of break-out author Virginia Evans talking about her novel, The Correspondent. Her ninth novel. Her only second published work (and the first was self-published). The manuscript she wrote in the closet office she built to have quiet space away from her multiple young children. She wrote The Correspondent while she was supposed to be writing another novel. Her brain just wanted to pursue that story, too. But she'd already promised the first to her agent, so The Correspondent stayed in the closet. That first novel (her 8th!) died on submission - your typical gentle publishing term. Do you know that if a book ends up behind schedule they call it a crash? So Virginia Evans went back to The Correspondent, finished it in her closet, submitted it for sale. Then she received dozens of no's over almost as many month until, finally, one editor said yes. Now it is a sensation. She met Oprah. She met Jane Fonda who will play her heroine in the movie adaptation for which there was a seven-way Hollywood studio bidding war.
But Virginia Evans haunts me because I don't think I could survive nine deaths for one hit. I don't think I could write in a closet. Balance multiple children. Receive so, so , so many no's and keeping telling myself, yes. Virginia Evans is like my ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. My heroine and my villain. She is exactly who I want to be and the person I'm most afraid of becoming.
— Jessie Rosen