Announcement: Friends of Mine (i.e., Elisa's written a memoir!)

Most of you know me well enough to know that I'm a Duran Duran fan. I've made no secret of this, have proudly worn my t-shirts and blasted my CDs in my car and searched eBay for memorabilia and tweeted and posted and swooned.

This year marks THIRTY YEARS of my fandom. Considering that the band's first single was released in 1981, some might say I came late to the party. But hey, I didn't have MTV or FM radio until much later.

At the 25-year mark, I had thought about writing a book about this relationship, the longest long-term relationship I've ever had. But I was too immersed in other projects. Last year, however, I knew the time had finally come.

A memoir is never about what you think it's going to be about. You think it's about a particular event or memory or experience; but once you start peeling back the layers, you find it's interwoven with so much more. To write solely about being a Duran Duran fan would've resulted in a personal essay, perhaps. What I discovered as I wrote were patterns -- my relationships with music, musicians, family, and friends. My relationship with me. Writing has been one of the constants of my life. Duran Duran has been the other.

And so, I'm proud (and even a little bit nervous!) to announce that my memoir, Friends of Mine, Thirty Years in the Life of a Duran Duran Fan, will be released on August 10, 2013. (Fellow Duranies will recognize the significance of the date.) One of the reasons this is so exciting/scary is because I'm jumping back into the self-publishing pool for this particular title. Self-publishing has come a long way in four short years. Things I got away with then I could never get away with now. The competition is four times as steep. My past success, my solid readership, my street cred guarantees me nothing. I could sink or swim. But, just as I did with Faking It years ago, I believe in this project, believe there's an audience, and believe the two will find their way to one another. And I've learned a lot over the years. I know way more now than I did four years ago.

This is also the most personal book I'm publishing. I worried about whether I could share so much with total strangers. But after showing the manuscript to a few trusted people, they reminded me of the truth about autobiographical writing. To quote the late Donald Murray: "As we read someone else's story, we read our own." One this book is out of my hands, it will become your story. I suppose the same argument could be made for fiction as well.

I just hope I don't disappoint.