I’m very very excited to announce that I’ll be publishing my third novel, IN TIMES TO COME, next year (2024) with Ecco and its publisher Helen Atsma.
I first started imagining this novel during the beginning of the COVID pandemic in March of 2020. Each week I’d call my “Oma” (the Dutch word for grandmother) in New Jersey and check in with her to see how she was holding up. As we spoke on the phone, she began to tell me stories about how she survived the Dutch “Hunger Winter” in 1944-45, at the end of the second World War, when she was only eight years old. My curiosity grew and grew, and over the next three years I did more and more research, going through her own records, studying the historical records, and eventually travelling to The Hague where I was able to walk the same paths she walked back then.
I’d never written “historical” fiction before, and I wasn’t sure how it would go. Early on, I confessed this to my former professor Alice McDermott during an interview about her new Craft book for BOMB Magazine. She, who has written so many beautiful novels set in the past, advised me to just forget about the “historical” adjective and treat it the same way I’d treat any other story or novel. Of course she was right, and I immediately began to see it all more clearly.
I’ve worked hard on all my books, but never quite like this. I read more, wrote more, and revised more than I’d ever done before, and somewhere in the attic studio at the Yaddo Artist’s Colony, I first managed to take 80 pages of bits and pieces and hammer them together into the spine of this novel. It almost doubled in size then, in the two weeks I worked on it there, and by the summer it was finished.
Or so I thought! We brought the book to a handful of trusted editors and got a strong response, but there was still work to be done. Over the last six months, I took almost 200 pages out of the novel, replaced it with about 100 new ones, and strengthened it in ways I couldn’t have seen before. I owe a huge thank you to Helen Atsma at Ecco, and to Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord Literistic, for helping me shepherd this through its final stages.
And now, it’s here, and I can’t wait to share it with you all next summer.
More to come!
I can't wait to read it! Also, " I took almost 200 pages out of the novel, replaced it with about 100 new ones," are words that I think I"ll be saying soon, myself. Nice to know it's nothing unusual!
Lovely! Congratulations.