My Book is a Phoenix: An Origin Story

My favorite thing about superheroes–supervillains even more so–is their origin story. I love discovering what makes a character tick, what helped mold them and shape the direction of their power. Origin stories are one of my favorite parts of the writing process, too: defining what brought my characters to this exact moment. With I Am Z(arah)–a book about a woman with an imaginary superhero alter ego–I’ve written origin stories for each character, though only snippets shine through in the novel itself. But I’m not going to go into those stories today. Instead, I want to focus on the origin of the book itself, starting 17 years ago.

Back in 2003, I spent the summer (and several more thereafter) filing papers at a cardiology office. And of course, being a lover of a great story, I read plotlines into patients’ files based on their names and occupations, their symptoms and their treatments, their voices (when I very occasionally answered phones), the way they dressed, and who brought them to their tests. I couldn’t help but weave characters in my head, and as I did so, I got a story idea for a woman who falls in love with a persona she’s built around a file. That story never went anywhere, but my failed attempts formed the infancy of Chapter 3 of I Am Z(arah).

I started writing I Am Z(arah) in earnest in 2010, and over the course of two years, it developed into a sweet romance about a girl with social anxiety and a guy with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome who bonded over comics and cake. It was flawed. To start, Zarah was defined almost entirely by her anxiety and was so shy, even with the reader, that her story fell flat. After a short stint of querying, two lovely agents confirmed my concerns, and I set my novel aside in 2012.

In 2013, three things happened over the span of a couple months that pulled me back to this book. First, two of my uncles died suddenly. This in itself did not pull me back to my novel, but to writing in general, and I joined a local writing group. Second, I had the privilege of seeing Wicked on Broadway, starring Lindsay Mendez as Elphaba. Her character was at once so strong yet so vulnerable, so passionate yet so unsure–she moved something in my heart. I thought, “This is what Zarah is missing. This is who Zarah could be.” I (thought I) knew what I needed to do.

But then the third thing happened a week later. On a crisp Monday morning in autumn, a fellow employee killed 12 people in my building at the Navy Yard. Much of my memory surrounding that day (and the weeks that followed) is either as vivid as if it were happening now or a blurred obscurity. One of those vivid memories is when I met a group of other survivors a couple weeks later, one of whom was a poet. We talked about how writing can help heal, and then this novel that I’d set aside started swimming around in my head again. The more I thought about it, the more I saw how the novel I’d written had always been just a shell, a project I hadn’t been ready or equipped to bring to fruition. Grief changes you. Trauma reorganizes your brain. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Elphaba, brilliant green and forging ahead, haters-be-damned. So, with the support of my writing group and my friends and family, I myself forged ahead with what blossomed into I Am Z(arah).

It took me several years to rewrite the book. I couldn’t face some of the more visceral scenes for four years. I unearthed Zarah’s true origin story as I wrote, gutting myself onto the page. The book–and I–became a phoenix. Gutted and burned, but stronger, glowing brighter, in a now-majestic form bloomed out of ash.

This book has been through writing groups, beta readers, sensitivity readers, editors, ARC readers, and many an agent who loved the manuscript but didn’t know of a place for it with a publisher. It is because of all of their feedback that I’ve chosen to self publish. While Zarah and Z and Greg don’t fit neatly into the big publishing space (being a new adult genre crossover of only 60K words), my readers and I believe in their stories and believe that their stories are important. 

Zarah, Z, and Greg have been my companions for so long that they’re an inextricable part of me. I hope you enjoy reading I Am Z(arah) as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

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I Am Z(arah) — a sweet romance/women’s fiction crossover featuring a young woman with PTSD, a quirky heart patient, and a dash of imaginary superheroes — is out March 24, 2020. You can find it on Amazon and Goodreads, or you can read the first chapter here.