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Susan Breen is our guest blogger during the week of February 25th. If you have any questions for Susan Breen, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Fiction Class:

On paper, Arabella Hicks seems more than qualified to teach her fiction class on the Upper West Side: she's a writer herself; she's passionate about books; she's even named after the heroine in a Georgette Heyer novel.

On the other hand, she's thirty-eight, single, and has been writing the same book for the last seven years. And she has been distracted recently: on the same day that Arabella teaches her class she also visits her mother in a nursing home outside the city. And every time they argue. Arabella wants the fighting to stop, but, as her mother puts it, "Just because we're family, doesn't mean we have to like each other." When her class takes a surprising turn and her lessons start to spill over into her weekly visits, she suddenly finds she might be holding the key to her mother's love and, dare she say it, her own inspiration. After all, as a lifelong lover of books, she knows the power of a good story.

I went on a TV program this morning to promote my book. While this specific experience wasn't as demoralizing as some other ones have been, I still find going on television to be excruciating. (Please don't think I won't accept offers, studio heads! I'm available!) I'm a competent public speaker, but there's a reason why I'm a writer -- so that I can edit my thoughts. On television, you have to be glib, witty, and always ready with a sound bite. "Tell me why you wrote this book" in 20 seconds. It's a lot.

I'd have an easy answer to that question if I had been working on a book as a ghostwriter, doing something research-oriented, or writing the fourth mystery in a best-selling series. But if you don't fall into one of those categories -- if you just write because you need to do it, because you have stories tearing you up inside -- then how do you answer that? I'm not even sure why I decided to write about my life at such a young age. When I started working on it I had no idea what I was doing. I do know that by the end of the process, I felt like I'd come to a real understanding of who I was and who I needed to be going into the future. And that I hoped other young people in my circumstance could read it and feel the same way.

That's not bad, actually. When's the next TV show?

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Caille Millner

The Golden Road

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Penguin Books

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