Another Round of Book Covers

Some of you may be wondering about the genesis of this book, Bad Romance, and how and when I turned to fiction. I will try to be brief.

Way back when I was a wee slip of a girl, in my twenties and thirties, I dreamed of writing novels, specifically an Irving Stone-type story about the life of the great French 19^th-century sculptor Auguste Rodin. That was a bust. So was a thriller about an evil guy who plots to take over a successful artist’s life. I secured an agent, but the editorial response was not promising (those were the days, the late 1970s, when just about anyone with a great idea or a fledgling manuscript could get an agent—or so it seemed). A couple of years went by and early in my newlywed period, while living in Vermont, I tried some short stories (I even sent one to The New Yorker, and got a very sweet rejection, not the boilerplate they send out now—if you get any kind of response at all).

I tried another novel around the age of 40 and sent half of it off to the literary agent Jane Dystel. She was, to my surprise, wildly enthusiastic, and asked to see the second half. After reading that, she informed me that it was one of the worst pieces of shit ever to cross her desk (I don’t have the response she sent ca. 1991, but that was the gist of her message, and, yes, it was dispiritingly ugly). Then I really backed off from fiction for a long, long time.

Following my divorce, I began writing about art for ARTnews, the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, et al. for more than 20 quite fulfilling years. Then came the Vasari21 website, the Wright Contemporary, and so on ad (almost) nauseum.

My, what an interesting and professionally peripatetic life I’ve lived! And I haven’t even gotten into my six months of working at Self magazine, part of the famed Condé Nast empire, under the editorship of sexpert Alexandra Penny (that’s a story for another day).

But to get to the point: I believe it was in the summer of 2019 that I wrote three short stories in a row, all inspired by real-life events: a magical few months with my mother when I was fifteen, a hideous weekend with an Internet date when I was old enough to know better, and my 25^th high-school reunion, where I behaved in a crazy and borderline inappropriate manner. Then I put them all away, in the back drawers of my usually reliable WordPerfect filing system.

After I closed the gallery in December of 2024, casting about for more occupation than I’ve had with Substack, I pulled them out again and thought: Hey, these aren’t really too bad! Several more followed. Three were accepted for publication in online literary magazines. And by September 2025 I had a slim collection and sent them off to a competition sponsored by a small but respectable publisher called Press53. And I won a modest advance, and publication is now scheduled for early 2027.

Honestly, I haven’t been this excited since l was picked to play Winnie the Pooh in the second-grade school pageant!

So here we are in pre-production, and I’m fine-tuning the manuscript and doing other prep work. You saw a couple of cover choices last week, and my lovely editor has now pulled together a choice of four initial layouts. I will number them for your convenience. Keep in mind how these will show up as thumbnail images on Amazon and GoodReads. And Oprah will need to be engaged and curious enough to pick this out at random from among the thousands of books submitted to her club every month (coy smiley face here). To summarize the contents: these stories are in one way or another mostly about love gone off the rails, and they are often humorous in places, and I suppose they could be called autofiction, though the narrators are very different from one another and different from the me I know as me (I’ll talk more about this later). They have nothing whatsoever to do with conventional “romance” novels. Tell me which you like best. Or tell me if you think we are way off the mark. Or tell me I need a vacation. Because for sure that last part is the truest thing I know.

So please do weigh in, when you’ve had a chance to consider these. Both my editor and I take your opinions very seriously. You are my core audience, my “focus group,” it you like.

Till next time. xxA