In 2001, I started writing my first novel. It was inspired by the view through my apartment window in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. Every day, I would look through the window as if it were a TV screen: a nightclub for trans DIVAS next door to a fire department with a weekly hotel tucked in between? It was often more entertaining than “Blind Date,” which was my fav reality show at the time. So I started writing. And then 9/11 happened. Suddenly firemen were in the media spotlight, and I felt like I was writing a really important book that was a metaphor of the TRANSformation of our country from naive/unaware superpower into a full-grown woman. I didn’t realize that I was writing about myself. I was a 26-year-old naive/unaware superpower growing into my womanhood, trying to find my voice. I finished the manuscript while backpacking through Central America and brought it back to one of the editors at Youth Outlook magazine in San Francisco. He read it in one weekend. He said he loved it, but, “Where is Melanie? Where are you?”
Apparently I had yet to find my voice, so I shelved that book and started applying to MFA programs. I got into California College of the Arts. But I didn’t go. Instead, I moved to Miami because apparently that was where my actual transformation-coming-of-age story would take place.