Happy birthday You. I. Us., you gorgeous thing!
It feels like I've been anticipating this day for a long time - in fact, I signed the contract in April 2015!
Writing these stories was a lot of fun, and completely different from the way I usually write. Because of the short length of each one, I curled up for a week - wrapped in a thick cardigan, because it was winter - and just wrote whatever came into my head. Several stories remain unchanged from those initial sessions, others merged together, a couple were thrown away for being rubbish. A few more - for example, Ode to River and Growing Apart - are autobiographical, which was an interesting experiment.
I want to say a huge thank you to Jessica Bell and Dawn Ius from Vine Leaves Press for all their hard work on this book, for the cover art (still so beautiful!) and for rapping my knuckles every time they saw a semi-colon. I have not completely overcome my semi-colon addiction, but I do consider their usage a little more.
Thank you too, to Kyra Lennon, for reading the first draft of the stories and throwing out the weakest links.
Next week, my blog tour starts. I'll be answering a question a day, provided by some awesome bloggers. I hope you can join me!
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In You. I. Us., Annalisa Crawford captures everyday people during poignant defining moments in their lives: An artist puts his heart into his latest sketch, an elderly couple endures scrutiny by a fellow diner, an ex-student attempts to make amends with a girl she bullied at school, a teenager holds vigil at his friend’s hospital bedside, long distance lovers promise complete devotion, a broken-hearted widow stares into the sea from the edge of a cliff where her husband died, a grieving son contacts the only person he can rely on in a moment of crisis, a group of middle-aged friends inspire each other to live remarkable lives.
Day after day, we make the same choices. But after reading You. I. Us., you’ll ask yourself, “What if we didn’t?”
