Don’t give up! Don’t stay in your lane. Don’t give up on the small efforts around you to make life better. Find ways to make things better and take the actions you can.
Sitting with Alisha just days after: the release of her new book, Someone’s Gotta Give, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the Edinburgh Fringe and the Book Festival,and staring down the very real month long tour she is about to embark upon, the busy author and I had a candid chat about writing, inspiration and becoming a best-selling author.
When asked why this story, after the success of her debut book My What if Year, she explained her overwhelming feeling of “What do I do now?”
I caught the writing bug after I finished and submitted my first book; I love fiction with women in the center. I asked myself what if I create a story of a professional woman coming to the UK? But fiction is boundless, and hard, and required learning. The challenge of getting into character’s heads when they aren’t you, embodying another person who makes decisions and lives a life of their own and makes you say, ‘Stop! Why did you do that?’ It’s hard. And yet, there are so many books that exist that do it.
I sat on this book for about five months after my previous agent told me not to pursue it. I turned to my fellow writer friends and asked ‘Is there anything worth pursuing?’ Through their support I just kept writing. I was encouraged to stay in my lane as it were, and I didn’t.
When asked to expound upon the challenges she faced in getting the book into the world we embarked on a lovely conversation of the drafting process.
There were eleven drafts in total! There were almost four complete rewrites. The ending remained every time, but the beginning changed every time. I had to sacrifice some real world philanthropy based experiences…I would love to write a whole novel about philanthropy tax laws but I don’t think I could! My editor was great and early on said that she would make suggestions and we would work through them. The only real salty changes were I had to change the title and a few character’s names. I am still afraid I will accidentally refer to a character by their old name in interviews.
When asked about her hope for the book, Alisha was frank.
I really want a lot of people to read it who exist in the nonprofit scene because the sector is on its knees…I want to give them a relatable escape! And I want to open people up to the realities of that world who are general readers, too.
It is a huge shift from writing nonfiction to fiction, and Alisha alluded to the fact this book, and its associated process, changed her intrinsically as a writer. She had some thoughts on how this book has also changed her as a person.
Since 2016, there was a real watershed moment thinking…’Is anything I am doing worth pursuing?’ as someone who dedicated themselves to making the world a better place. This story brought me back to my early days of working in philanthropy and rekindled my love for the social good sector, and that was so unexpected because I had become so jaded.
We closed our discussion with a brief look at the book itself and her favorite moments to which Alisha said:
Anything snarky, I am not a snarky person, but any time Lucia says anything to Belly, I think it’s my favorite. I am glad I don’t have a ‘Belly’ in my life.
If you want to catch Alisha at the Edinburgh International Book Festival you can buy tickets to her event on the 22nd here: Alisha Fernandez Miranda, Emma Gannon & Jessica Stanley: Love Undone
To see her other related works and appearances, including her upcoming tour, go to: Alisha Fernandez Miranda
To purchase her new book:
Buy Someone’s Gotta Give in the US