THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2024 53 Wessel: Tell us about your journey, from idea stage to publication. Buford: Writing the book was the easy part. Indeed, I had to write the book because of what I was seeing in Cambodia. en I spent years trying to interest literary agents and publishers in my work, to no avail. Finally, I published the book myself through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. My only regret is that I waited so long to go that route. All my books have been published this way, and it’s paid o . Kiesling: I started out with little vignettes that didn’t go anywhere, and then decided to leave my full-time job for a part-time job and spend a year completing a draft. I was very lucky that it worked out, and I was able to get an agent at the end of that year. Monahan: I started writing the story when I joined a creative writing group while living in Rome, never thinking about having it published, just writing chapters to share. It was a make-believe world I dove into for fun and writing practice. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to edit the lengthy pages and realized that if I could polish it into a cohesive story, I could try to get it published. So I rewrote the whole thing, edited it for ow, and began to look for a publisher. Literary agents wanted nothing to do My upbringing as a Foreign Service brat is fundamental to my experience of the world and my ideas about place and home. —Lydia Kiesling
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