u/JustWriteItAllDown

I’m probably going to delete this but I'm forcing myself to get out there a little. I’d love to find some other 30+ women working on their debut novels and hoping to traditionally publish someday. We have jobs, families, an exorbitant amount of protein to consume etc. But somehow carve out time to write something that fills our cup.

Mostly just looking for a few writer friends who get it, and maybe eventually swapping chapters if it feels like a good fit.

First time here for QCRIT. Appreciate this community!

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I am excited to share I WAS MARTHA ONCE (complete at 70,000 words). It is a literary speculative novel about memory, motherhood, and the lives we cannot keep, combining the reincarnation structure of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life with the intimate grief and quietly metaphysical atmosphere of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility.

Martha Vero dies at nineteen in a fire behind her family home. Then she wakes up as someone else.

Across multiple reincarnations—a meticulous newspaper fact-checker, a precocious child obsessed with impossible questions, a single mother who builds a family inside an Italian restaurant—Martha carries fragments of the women she used to be.

But memory becomes a wound. As the lives accumulate, Martha is increasingly unable to separate the grief that belongs to the present from the pain she has carried across decades. When she remembers the son she raised in another life, she spends years searching for him, only to find that he has grown up, and to him, she is a complete stranger. 

By the time Martha returns as Alma Quinn, an artist who turns her memories into art, she has built the first life that feels like her own. But when the familiar warm light of death comes for someone she loves, Alma glimpses the infinite lives running alongside hers and finally understands what the women before her could not: one ending is not the whole truth, and this life is still hers to live. 

I WAS MARTHA ONCE is my debut novel. [bio]