For a period of one year, Kimmery posted once a week on TheDebutanteBall.com, a website for traditionally published debut female authors. In this post we were talking about the books we haven't yet published.

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Remember that summer when everyone was surreptitiously reading Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindles, eyes darting shiftily as they tried to project the air of a person deep in thoughtful analysis of some highbrow masterpiece? Yep. I read it too, and I had the same thought as everyone else: Geez. I could write a book. Not a flaming porn book, maybe (although I happen to think I could rock that too, assuming anyone else would have an interest in nerdy almost-porn). No, it was the writing that motivated me. 

Fifty Shades didn’t become a bestseller because of the stellar writing, I know. But it did drive home the point that in our new digital world anyone could publish a book about anything. This struck a chord: somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain lurked a budding author, who’d been patiently biding her time until I woke up to her presence.

In a fit of misguided confidence I sat down and started a novel. To make a long story short, 5000 revisions later, The Queen of Hearts was released. Having your first novel published is fabulous, but the downside is you don’t have a bunch of other manuscripts in the drawer and you don’t have a lot of writing experience. Therefore I am going to talk today about the unwritten manuscript in my mind.

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The Dad Book.

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I have this idea I’d like to base a protagonist on my father. My dad was a singular dude, unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. He was also my favorite person and he died, suddenly and shockingly one night, in the midst of perfect health. After he died, his brother in Arizona went through his stuff and we discovered—to no one’s surprise—that an old IQ test indicated he was literally one of the smartest people on earth. He knew everything: as a child, in the pre-internet era, I used him as an encyclopedia whenever I had a question about physics or geopolitics or economics or literature or history or anything except fashion, basically. (No exaggeration on the fashion front: at the time of his death, Dad wore the exact same size and style of clothing he’d always worn, not appreciating the point of wearing different sorts of outfits on different occasions and certainly not appreciating the point of spending money on clothing. He had maybe four outfits, and refused to wear a tie, ever, on the grounds they were pointless and stupid.* Every now and then in a crowd I will spy the tall, slim silhouette of a man wearing worn black jeans and disintegrating army boots and it makes me want to weep.)**

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