Long long ago, some time after the Bronze Age...I think it was the mid-1990s...Gloria signed up as a volunteer for some bike-a-thon. It was a desperate act of impulse by a primal need to shatter the boredom of her life. Rational thoughts were not needed here. She gave her address and phone number. She promised her time, her weekend, her car. She signed her name on the Xerox line. She was now an official support driver for the Save Mono Lake Bike-a-Thon. She regretted it immediately. But a commitment was a commitment. In that September weekend of reluctant philanthropy, Gloria spent the long lonely hours in her car composing little scenarios in her head. Some scenarios were good enough to be granted characters. Characters evolved; they did funny things; they interacted with each other. Stories played out, got assessed, re-writes were made, and the stories were performed once again in her head, from the top. When she slept at night it was dress-rehearsal time. By the time she finished her Sunday breakfast, she had a perfectly quaint short story to add to her collection. When she made it back to her Los Angeles studio apartment, she got to typing. For a whole week, Gloria would come home from a long day of teaching 12th grade English and punch away at her typewriter until she was too tired to carry on. By the following weekend she had a perfectly fine little story with some wonderful characters. Some playful characters. Some rebellious characters - they weren't satisfied with their perfectly fine sandbox of a short story. They wanted more. They wandered out and lived their lives. And for the rest of the semester, Gloria wrote. She taught and she typed, taking only rare breaks to feed herself and water her bougainvillea. By the time Christmas break rolled around, Gloria had completed a manuscript for her first novel...a romance novel. It needed editing and rewrites, but it was there. It was the start of an exciting, new career. She would write for a living, not just for a hobby. Write and travel. The travel would inspire the writing. The writing would pay for the travel. That was the dream. She was awfully proud of this first of many novels...even if she had aggressively MarySued herself into it. Write what you know, right? She read and re-read her first novel, each time catching little parallels to her own life that her subconscious had woven in. The subtle parallels grew less and less subtle. In fact, they weren't subtle at all. It was her life...but not her real life. It was the what-if life she occasionally surrendered up to her imagination. It wasn't a novel at all; it was the stupid fever-fantasy of a middle aged woman. By the end of Christmas break, the manuscript was stuffed unceremoniously into a shoe box and crammed under her bed, next to photo albums and storage bins. There it would live - crammed under beds, shoved into closets, piled above the rafters - decade after decade. Too precious to be thrown away; too shameful to see the light of day. At least, that's how my grandmother told it to me when she handed me a beat-up shoebox that sagged with an unknown weight. She knew I was getting into publishing, and so she looked to me to give her story the chance she never could. Then it was my turn. I read and re-read; edited and re-edited. By the end, I wasn't sure what I had in my possession. Was it a romance novel? Yes, but no. Was it a memoir...a family chronical? No, but yes. A subtle treatise on the tricky nature of memory and the sentimental absurdities of love? Probably not. I can't even tell if it should be deemed fiction or non-fiction at this point. But whatever it is...whatever it has become...genres be damned...here it is, Grandma - our first book.