Hello!  This is Sarah Brooks, author of The Beginning of Us.  Thank you for joining me on my blog tour this week!

Every comment you make on this blog tour enters you in a DRAWING for a $25 Amazon gift card!  Entries close at midnight, Eastern Time, on February 2nd, and the winner will be announced on February 3rd.  Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries.

I suppose I could have chosen to write The Beginning of Us as a traditional narrative, but that’s not how the story came to me.  My initial image was of a college senior alone in her room on a deserted college campus at winter break, typing on her laptop.  I had her address the woman she loved, assuming that I would then move into regular narration of events.  However, the story wanted to stay epistolary . . . and in today’s world, that means letters, but it also means emails and texts.

The epistolary form allowed me to use second person, which I love for its intimacy and the fact that it turns the reader into a kind of intruder.  It’s as if the reader has stumbled onto the correspondence by accident, and turns the pages knowing full well they are not for his or her eyes. I love the tension in that.

Today’s technology challenged my epistolary form for a while, though.  I attended college in the late ‘90s, and originally set this story in that era.  That meant it was easy for the protagonist, Tara, to lose contact with her beloved, Eliza.  She checked her email (which was laboriously slow), but knew Eliza rarely used it.  In frustration, she unplugged the modem.  She did not own a cellphone and neither did Eliza, and Facebook wasn’t founded until 2004.  Thus:  silence.  She tried Eliza’s landline once or twice, and then, in despair, she began writing long letters to Eliza, fearing she was gone forever.

When my wonderful editor at Riptide, Sarah Frantz, suggested that readers would identify with the story far more if I set it in contemporary time, I knew I’d need to struggle with the myriad ways we use to reach each other now.  If the story was going to be contemporary, I’d need to give Tara and Eliza cellphones and deal with why they couldn’t just text or FaceTime each other.  I’d need to explain why Tara wasn’t haunting Facebook, why she wasn’t checking her email every few minutes.

Another problem:  on today’s college campuses, it’s not so easy to turn off the internet, as Tara did in my early drafts.  I emailed my step-brother, who’s a Digital Initiatives Librarian at a college, and he helped me understand (with many paragraphs about technical issues) that it’s nearly impossible to turn off campus-wide internet unless unforeseen disaster – like a bomb – struck.  I didn’t want to add that twist to my plot.

Ultimately, it was fairly easy to modernize Tara and Eliza’s stories, and the addition of increased email access and cellphones actually helped me discover the story’s resolution.  All our technology has not changed the fact that lovers still disappear, still evade us . . . but maybe it’s made the crevasses between us a bit easier to cross when we’re ready to do so.  Compare the estranged lovers of antiquity to modern lovers like Eliza and Tara.  I mean, if Romeo had received a text from Juliet explaining the exact plan (especially the part about how she wasn’t really dead), they might have both lived to grow old together.  Maybe.

Go to http://riptidepublishing.com/titles/the-beginning-of-us to read Tara and Eliza’s story. 

About The Beginning of Us:

Eliza, where are you? I’m listening, watching, waiting for you. I need you. How dare you run away? Where’s the courage, the fearlessness I fell in love with?

I don’t know what else to do but write. It’s dark in my dorm room, and the wind rattles the panes of my window, and I’m supposed to be driving to my parents’ right now for winter break, but I can’t feel my arms or my legs, and my chest aches because I don’t know where you’ve gone. Or why.

I know I shouldn’t have fallen in love with my professor. But you inspired me when you stood in front of the class, telling us to find our authentic selves. And I did—with you. How could I know that you would be so afraid of this, of us? That you’d be so terrified of . . . yourself? Wherever you are, Eliza, hear me—and come back to me.

Love (yes, I’ll write that word, Professor), Your Tara

Sarah Brooks was born and raised on a farm in Iowa, traveled through Europe and Central America, and lived in Alaska for a decade before she moved to Colorado to live near her family.  When she’s not writing late at night, she raises her beautiful, sassy six-year-old daughter Mitike; teaches middle schoolers how to love writing and reading; and hikes in the mountains.

Sarah holds English and religion majors from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa; an MAT from the University of Alaska Southeast; and (nearly — in one more semester) an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University in Boulder.
Published mostly as an essayist (in Sinister Wisdom, Room, The English Journal, and Iris Brown, among other places), Sarah writes the lesbian fiction she wishes she could read.

Connect with Sarah:

Blog: theboulderlesbian.blogspot.com
Website: http://sarahbrooks.webstarts.com/
Email: msbrooks127@gmail.com