We’ve been having so much fun taking those old unpublished novels out from
under the bed that we decided to ask some of our friends to do the same! Today,
I’m thrilled because we’ve got Amy Sue Nathan, whose debut novel, THE GLASS
WIVES, is being published by St. Martin’s in 2013. She’s also the force behind the popular blog,
Women’s Fiction Writers. She’s got an
excerpt from her unpublished novel, PICKING DAISY, which I think you’ll
love. The story behind it is pretty
interesting in its own right, too! But,
enough of what I think. I’ll let Amy
take it from here…
Picking On Trunk Novels
by Amy Sue Nathan
For me, the best part of an
having a novel I’ve tucked under the bed, is that I can tear it to bits, bully,
and shove away again without feeling guilty.
There’s a certain amount of power I have over it because no one else is
going to read it. The expectations for that book have been tempered. I have
nothing to lose. It’s kind of…freeing.
Somewhere between finishing my
upcoming novel The Glass Wives and it selling, I wrote a novel called Picking
Daisy. I got the idea for the novel when salespeople and wanderers kept showing
up at my front door. I thought: what
would happen if some long-lost relative showed up one day? We never really know who’s knocking, do
we? And what if there was someone who
knew something about me even I didn’t know? Would I let them in? Shoo them
away? I loved the characters in this
story: a dark and artist teenager, an eccentric aunt, a workaholic father, and
insecure step-mother. I loved playing
with points of view. I loved writing a family who celebrates Christmas -- since
I’m Jewish and never have. I only went two rounds of revisions on this book
before realizing, with the help of my agent, that it just wasn’t what it needed
to be. The story was scattered and the
way to corral it, was to change the focus, and the main characters. That would change the story so exponentially
that I wasn’t interested in doing it. I wanted to tell Daisy’s story and it
just wasn’t her time, my time, our time.
Still, Daisy holds a special
place in my writing heart. She’s a girl
who has been kept from her father her entire life and all she wants is to be
part of his family – and she’s willing to do just about anything to get it.
Even dye the pink out of her hair.
Below is the opening to Picking
Daisy. I hope there’s a smidgen of room in your heart for her as well.
PICKING DAISY
by Amy Sue Nathan
For
eighteen years and three months Daisy thought of her father as a test tube
specimen. Now, she was standing at his front door.
It was
freezing outside, probably way below zero.
She didn’t lick her dry lips, afraid they’d freeze together and she
wouldn’t be able to talk. With fist
raised and drawn, Daisy was ready to knock then the door clicked and opened
about eight inches. Daisy saw a petite woman in a pink T-shirt with a white
Nike swish and fitted black Lycra shorts.
She looked like Martha Stewart, only sweatier.
“I’d like
to speak with Elliot Evans,” Daisy said.
She smiled, opened her black-lined eyes wide and then chided herself for
trying to look cute, like a kitten someone would want to bring in from the cold
and keep for her own.
“He’s not
here. Can I help you with something?” The woman opened the wooden door wide but
stood behind the glass storm door holding the handle. Daisy didn’t know if Martha was unlocking it
or keeping it closed.
“I’d like
to meet him,” Daisy said. “I’m his
daughter.” No need pretending she was there to sell cookies.
“Very
funny, young lady. We don’t have a daughter. I should know. I’m Maggie Evans,
his wife.”
“Then you
are my step-mother. Nice to meet you.”
Daisy held out an invisible skirt and curtsied.
Step-Martha
smiled with a closed mouth, looked at the floor and stepped back, pushing the
door closed.
Daisy held
up her right hand. She spoke without taking a breath. “My name is Daisy. My
mother is Olivia. Olivia Cooper.”
Maggie
opened the door. Her eyes shot up and
she stared at Daisy. She turned away,
wrapped her arms around herself and faced Daisy again. “How do you know about
Olivia?”
“She’s my
mother.” Was Maggie Evans deaf?
“Elliot
hasn’t seen Olivia in over twenty years.”
“According
to my mom, and when she says he moved out, it’s nineteen years, not twenty.”
Maggie
rolled her eyes like a teenager. “Yes,” Maggie said. “And they divorced before
they had any children.”
“That’s
true, but my birthday is August twenty-second.
My mother was eight weeks pregnant the February he left. What’s so hard to believe? He was her
husband.”
Daisy knew
all of it was hard to believe. She’d
been saying it aloud for seven days, since her mother’s cell phone
confession. Daisy was not a Donor
Conceived Offspring. Her mother had not been artificially inseminated because
she’d always wanted a child but never wanted to marry. Her mother had been married to her father for
five years when Daisy was conceived the old-fashioned way. During break-up
sex. As if the reconfigured story of her
parentage wasn’t bad enough – Daisy could no longer boast being miracle of
modern technology. She could no longer
daydream about the comprehensive daddy database from which her blue eyes,
black-brown hair, long legs, athleticism, temperament and medical history were
chosen. She was nothing more than an unfortunate accident. And a very big
secret.
“Look, can
I come in?” Daisy asked. “It’s fucking cold out here.” So much for the cute kitten effect.
“Watch
your language, young lady.”
Daisy shoved her bare hands into the pockets of her
not-meant-for-Pennsylvania-in-winter fleece jacket. “I‘ll take a DNA test,” Daisy said again. “If
he wants proof.”
“If you
don’t go away I’m going to call the police.” Maggie's short, well-manicured fingernail tapped a rapid beat on the
“No Solicitors Invited” sticker on the sidelight. The
tapping matched Daisy’s pulse both in tempo and tone. “This means
you can’t knock on my door unless I give you permission,” Maggie added through
a clenched jaw.
“I’m not
trying to sell you something. I’m your
husband’s daughter.” The final word
caught in her throat and Daisy swallowed the last syllable. She shivered and turned away,
blinked and tipped back her head to retract the tears and to sort through her
thoughts. She
looked at the brick driveway and the cobblestone path that had been cleared of
snow, and then looked up at the two story French-style house. Chateau. Mansion.
“I don’t want any of this,” she said, facing Maggie while removing her
hands from her pockets. She didn’t. She wanted a family. “I just want to meet
my father. He didn’t even know my mother was pregnant. God, I just want him to
know he has a daughter.”
This was
not going as planned. The imagined tears
of her still-imaginary father replaced by the scowl and disbelief of his wife.
“Elliot
doesn’t have a daughter,” Maggie said.
Daisy
crossed her arms, lodged her hands under her armpits for warmth and effect, and
poked her left eyebrow so high it hid beneath her pink-streaked bangs.
“He does
now.”
Daisy watched the door close and stared at the engraved brass knocker
she hadn’t noticed earlier. Evans. Daisy hadn’t heard that name until the
week before. An internal twist, an unfamiliar blend of cramps and exhilaration.
Her birthright was on the inside, not outside standing on the oversized
unwelcome mat. She turned and ran to the
idling taxi in the driveway. Good thing she hadn’t paid the driver and told
him to come back later. Daisy climbed
into the back seat. She wiggled her
toes, stretched her fingers and began to thaw.
She looked at the drawn curtains but knew step-Maggie was watching her.
The cab
backed out of the driveway. Unaccustomed
to the crunchy sound of snow dust beneath the tires, Daisy listened with
intention and heard every crackle, crunch and squash. When the taxi sat parallel to the house the
driver shifted the car into park. Daisy fumbled in her pocket. Gum. She held out a stick of Juicy Fruit to
the driver. He turned and accepted it,
smiling.
“You okay,
miss?”
“Not
really,” Daisy said.
“You’re
prettier than her,” he said. “That woman at the door.”
Daisy
sniffed and smiled. “Thank you.”
“We can
just stay here if you like.”
“No,
that’s okay. I’m ready to go.”
Daisy
watched the too-still curtains of her father’s house and beauty-pageant-waved
as they drove off.
New and
old money mansions rose out of the snow like castles on clouds. Remnants of
well-manicured, gardener-tended bushes draped icicles like pearls on a string
around a graceful neckline. Who knew it
snowed in November?
Daisy
pictured the house she grew up in tucked into the current landscape. She smiled.
That house was pale and bold with sharp lines like her mother and sparse
like their time together. It was a
rectangle that sat over a cliff and overlooked the beach -- nothing like the
brick and mortar monstrosities with turrets, bay windows and chandeliers
overlooking the road and more houses.
Daisy’s lifelong backyard was the beach, her view, the horizon. People flocked to La Jolla to escape the cold
and the heat. Daisy had fled La Jolla the day after high school for a summer
French immersion program in Paris. She
met her mother at Reed College for move-in day at the end of August. She had planned to spend Thanksgiving with
her mom and favorite aunt, but when Daisy arrived at the Portland airport, she
booked the redeye to Philadelphia instead.
She had to
admit, aside from the front door fiasco, she liked Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. It was a touch gaudy and a tad pretentious,
but the premature twinkle lights were strewn with good intentions.
Her mother
would have disliked it for the same reasons.
Daisy
paced her hotel room, no bigger than an inside cruise ship cabin. She dumped her hobo bag contents on the bed,
hoping for an escaped candy bar at the bottom, or her uneaten honey-roasted
airplane-peanuts, but all she found was chewed gum balled and half wrapped in
paper. Gross. She took two steps to the
bathroom, threw the gum in the trashcan under the sink. She unwrapped the small cake of soap on the
ledge and washed the stickiness she knew would never be all-the-way gone. Daisy
pictured the vending machine down the hall, next to the ice machine. Her stomach growled. Five-star hotels had
five-star snacks. Hotels like this had
vending machines. The best vending machines. But the snack would wait. She dug for her
case of graphites, and drew.
First
short strokes, then longer ones, straight and curved and then round, creating
her own rendition of step-Martha. Just a
rough image of a woman barricading a door.
Daisy could finish it later, adding the subtle lines around the eyes,
revealing the slight twitch in the lip, the sweat on the décolleté. Daisy guffawed. If she had been speaking to
her mother she would have speed-dialed the office and joked about how French
language had permeated her thoughts – just like Olivia had wanted. But she wasn’t speaking to her mother. Daisy focused on the page, the shadowy
bricks, the mullet-shaped snow drifts, the tire tracks, the dark beyond the
door, the abyss that was her father.
Daisy
struck a pseudo-yoga pose and stretched her feet to her head. Her back cracked and she got down to the business
of piecing together the life of her brother, laying papers in front of in order
of importance, not chronology.
She wanted
to already know Chase Evans when she met him, like an older sister should. She
was only two years older, but still. Her
personality was classic first born. She
had assumed it was because she had donor-siblings scattered across the U.S. or
at least California. In reality it was because she had an unintentional sibling
on the other coast.
Daisy laid
down her head atop the papers. They were
cool and smooth. She tucked her hands
under the pillows above her head and closed her eyes.
She wanted to make a good impression on her
newfound family and was not off to a stellar start. The sarcasm would probably
have to go, along with the cursing. Her
mother wasn’t sarcastic at all, it didn’t suit her. Daisy figured it was just her nature but now
she wondered if it was Elliot Evans’ nature as well. What else about herself she would see in him
when she met him? She grabbed her purse. To hell – to heck – with step-Martha.
It was time to find out.
#
Amy Sue Nathan’s debut novel, THE
GLASS WIVES, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2013. Amy’s
stories and essays have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times
online, The Washington Post online, The Huffington Post, Chicago Parent, Grey
Sparrow Journal, Rose and Thorn Journal, Scribblers On The Roof, The Verb,
Hospital Drive Journal and The Stone Hobo. In 2011 she launched Women’s
Fiction Writers, a blog focusing on the authors, business and craft of
traditionally published women’s fiction. Amy is also a freelance fiction
editor, and a reader for literary agents. She currently serves as secretary for
the RWA-WF Chapter.
Amy lives near Chicago and is the mom
of a son in college, a daughter in high school, and two rambunctious rescued
dogs.
Here’s a peek into The Glass Wives,
coming from St. Martin’s Press in 2013:
When
a tragic accident ends the life of Richard Glass, it upends the lives of
ex-wife, Evie, second wife, Nicole, and their children. Still, there’s no love
lost between the ex and the new widow. In fact, Evie sees a silver lining in
the heartache—the chance to move forward without Nicole in their lives. But
Evie wasn’t counting on her children’s bond with their baby brother, and she
certainly wasn’t counting on Nicole hanging on to the threads of family, no
matter how frayed. And anyway, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Evie
and Nicole, both emotionally and fiscally spent by Richard’s death, agree to
share living expenses—and Evie’s house. The arrangement, purely financial in
Evie’s mind, has its benefits, such as a live-in babysitter. But it also
exposes secrets and causes rifts between Evie and her closest friends. Then,
when she suspects that Nicole is rearranging more than her kitchen, Evie must
decide whom she can trust. More importantly, Evie must decide what makes a
family. And if two Glass wives can be stronger than one.
