Excerpt from Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm

If I ever finish, this will be the third book I have written. Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day—on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room. In recent years, I have written on the computer every day—on my blog, in Microsoft Word, on email—for hours, sometimes all night long. That is the norm for me. What's weird about it is that every single page is filled with another attempt to write the perfect opening paragraph to a book. I have about fifty thousand opening paragraphs, and I never seem to get beyond that part of writing the book.

I read A Tale of Two Cities a few times, and the opening sentence, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." remains the most precise sentence I have ever read. It remains my favorite book, too. I find the writing so moving, and the story is so perfectly told. When I first read it, I saw all the way to my grave in the character of Madame de Farge, the old biddy who silently weaves the code of revolution into the blankets she crochets. Roseannearchy is my attempt to weave my own revolutionary code into the pages of this book.