For a writer, I'm sure not doing a whole lot of writing lately.

First off, my New Years Resolution is to get better at updating this space. I'm not used to writing a blog, especially on my website, to the point that I often forget it even exists. Maybe I should start setting reminders in my phone- hey, dummy, don't forget that you have a website that needs updated.

Secondly, and in much more exciting news, my debut novel is finally available for pre-order! You can grab it here!

https://tinyurl.com/Give-My-Love-to-Berlin

I started writing this novel way back in February of 2020 and it was something very, very different. I was inspired by the letters my grandmother had kept from her boyfriend who was fighting in France in World War 2. She had every single letter he'd ever written to her, but included in the stack of letters was one that she'd written to him, stamped in big red letters "Return to Sender." He had been killed in action and he never received that last letter she wrote.

Now, if he hadn't been killed in the war, I would have never existed. She would have married him instead of my grandfather and that would have been that. But she kept those letters and she kept his picture, framed, next to her bed until the day she died. She never got over the loss.

I knew there was a story there, in those letters. So, in February of 2020, I started writing. The story was about an American woman who's spouse was missing-in-action and it took place after Pearl Harbor- a very different story from the one my novel turned into. Then, about a month after I started writing, the world shut down because of the pandemic. My spouse was considered an essential worker, so he was still going to work and I was left to figure out what to do with four children ages ten and younger shut up in the house for hours upon hours.

The year prior, my oldest child had come out as non-binary, so in June of 2020, since going to Pride wasn't going to be an option, we decided to do an entire month studying LGBTQ history. I had never really learned about LGBTQ history past Stonewall, so I was learning right alongside my child and that's when I learned about Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. He was a doctor from the Weimer Period in Germany and was a leading mind in LGBTQ studies at a time when being gay was a jailable offense in most places. He started the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919 in Berlin and their motto was "Through Science to Justice." At the Institute, they studied gender and psychology and created a safe place for the queer humans living in the area at the time. By the mid and late 1920s, Berlin was considered the gay capitol of the world.

I'm not sure if I can explain the connection I felt to these humans that lived one hundred years ago, but, as a queer human myself, I couldn't stop thinking about how brave and incredible the people living in Berlin at that time must have been. Ruth, Tillie, James, and Ernesto grew from that connection I felt. Writing this story almost felt like a compulsion- I had to get this story out into the world. Tillie went from an American housewife missing her husband to a queer woman living in Berlin with her girlfriend and her chosen family, trying to survive the rise of Fascism.

I wrote (and researched) voraciously over the next two years. I finished my final draft in March of 2022, signed with my agent by September of 2022, and we spent six months perfecting the manuscript before she sent it out to publishers. In March of 2024, two full years after I finished that first draft, my novel was picked up by a publisher.

Give My Love to Berlin will be released on May 20, 2025, just in time for Pride Month and roughly five years after I started writing the story. With everything happening now in our own government, the story of Tillie and her friends is more relevant then ever, because history always repeats itself. I've loved these characters since I created them, and I hope that other people can read my novel and love them too. I want readers to find hope in the struggle that Tillie and her friends are forced to endure. Even though there was not a happy ending for many queer people living in Germany at the time, my goal with my novel was to ensure that their stories survived. I want people to know they existed. Queer people have always been here and will continue to live and thrive and refuse to be silenced, regardless of what any government thinks of them and their existence.