Challenges vs Luck

As authors, we all have different and often many difficult challenges we face along the way but sometimes our drive and good luck can help us move forward. Today's guest in My Writing Corner,  Nancy Stevenson, has met and managed to overcome a number of challenges, but she says it all begins with support.

Take it away, Nancy! Please tell us your story:

Parents set the stage for most of us. I was lucky. The life I landed in was filled with

smart adults willing to share their interests and thoughts with a wide variety of friends.

My sister and I became accomplished eavesdroppers, loving their laughter and their

serious pursuits which included travel, history, mental health, good food, politics and

civic leadership.

The years slipped by. College followed. I became engaged to a man returning from his years of Marine Corp duties in Korea before returning to college for my senior year. Like so many of my era, I married three weeks after graduation from college.

After my husband finished law school, we returned with our first child to live in Chicago. As our family grew, they worked through the summer months, baling and storing hay bales, interrupting but not forfeiting river excursions and pond swimming. Idyllic years of our two girls galloping on farm horses, the two boys on motorized scooters and good hard work for all of us. The children are grown now with children of their own.

My luck continued in that a friend suggested I join the Illinois Humanities Council, (now

Illinois Humanities) part of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was a heady

experience to sit and even occasionally argue with a published Shakespearean expert

or the Director of the Field Museum or laugh over the spontaneous poetry of a Swift

scholar from the University of Chicago.

After the birth of a grandchild, I began to want to write stories for her. Subsequently

signing up for a two year program in Writing for Children at Vermont College, now the

Vermont College of Fine Arts. With the guidance of inspiring authors and the spirited

learning of fellow students, we were told to write and write and write some more, “Butt in

Chair” as Jane Resh Thomas admonished. Plus every month, we would produce writing

for a critique from one of the faculty. After Vermont College, I threw myself into

NaNoWriMo with its challenge of 50,000 words written in the month of November. Since

then, writing is my joy, my break from problems, my companion when the apartment is

Empty.

What do you find is the most challenging part of being an author?

Telling the story is all-consuming and the fun part. The challenges come from taking the stories to the public by finding a publisher, then in their promotion.

How do you develop characters?

I am now a widow living alone for the first time. My bossy characters, their problems, struggles and dreams, keep me company on long walks and sleepless nights. I don’t know where they come from, but they pop up with minds and goals of their own. On several occasions, they change the story. I don’t create a plot in advance. I let the characters give me direction.

What advice do you have for beginning writers?

For advice to beginning authors, I’ll repeat what many of  the gleanings from workshops, lectures and books by renowned writers, Eudora Welty, Stephen King, Anne Lamott, Margaret Atwood, Natalie Goldberg, etc. etc. ( I soak up great author’s words).

First order: Read, Read, Read.

Then: Write, Write, Write. Practice is everything, they all say.

Tell us about your road to publication.

I self published two children’s novels, Capitol Code and Horse Dreams, after finishing  a Vermont College curriculum, Writing for Children. I thought my age prevented me from looking for an agent that might help me find a publisher.

When I completed my adult novel, Long Reach, a friend suggested I submit my manuscript to The Wild Rose Press who reviews non-agented documents.

Happily, The Wild Rose Press accepted my text.

What is your book that you will feature today and how did you come up with the idea to write it?

When I heard about NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write 50,000 words in a month, my environmental mystery Long Reach evolved.  Of course, after that original out pouring of words, editing, cutting, developing scenes went on for several years of pulling it in and out of the filing cabinet.

A bit of history is what spurred me to write Long Reach.  My husband and I first went to the Inside Passage of the Georgia Strait, British Columbia, Canada after out marriage in 1955, a long time ago. He had visited friends on an island there in his childhood and wanted to go back. So we drove across the country on our wedding trip, took ferry boats to the island and I added my love of the area to my love of this new husband.

We continued to visit the Georgia Strait when life allowed, renting house boats to explore the coasts, taking children, joining friends over several years, finally building a small cabin on one of the many islands in the Strait. The area was known by its First Nation settlers as a land of plenty with whales, octopuses, salmon, crab, deer, ravens, eagles and lush vegetation, berries, edible ferns and vegetables.

We explored up and down the coast, watching the heavily snow-capped mountains losing  snow each year of global warming. We saw lush hilltop forests decimated by bull dozers, causing run off into the sea below. My daily dives into breath-taking cold seas grew easier with warming water, a pleasure for swimmers perhaps, but devastating to prawn and salmon spawning.

I was moved to tour one of the pulp mills to find out about the process and visited a library in the nearest town to understand more about lumbering and its ups and downsides.  With all these experiences, I knew I needed to write Long Reach.

Let's get a blurb:

Long Reach is a mystery of action and adventure with an unexpected twist. Is Nora guilty of pushing her husband overboard in a fit of violent anger? Or is she a victim in an environmental conspiracy?

On a fishing trip in the beautiful waters of the Georgia Strait, British Columbia, Canada, Nora is accused of attempting to murder Joe, her husband and partner of 30 years. Fearing her anger caused the incident, Nora strives to discover if she is guilty or innocent.

In the search for truth, thugs shoot at Nora, she is kidnapped, jailed and tried in court for manslaughter and other crimes. With the help of a First Nation Mountie and a First Nation healer, can Nora prove her innocence and expose the conspirators responsible for air, water, and land pollution and stealing rights from First Nation tribes?

Want more? Let's get a couple of short excerpts:

Albert Mackey, a provisional Mountie who has just left his drought stricken home in Alberta, is assigned to a fishing accident. He dashes to the scene in his outboard Zodiak, thinking. Here In Grant’s landing, he found water aplenty, but also aching poverty and death from drought of another kind. Nature’s spectacles were diminishing: forests once filled with cedars and firs, now cut raw to the bone on mountainsides that plunged to the sea; giant logs, some eight feet across, dumped into the ocean and dragged off to factories and pulp mills; islands laid bare by giant bulldozers scraping thin topsoil to the channels below; runoff and refuse sinking to cover

spawning beds; clear water becoming thick like mucus. On arrival from Alberta, he’d thought he had found perfection. Instead, he looked at a world filled with breathtaking mountain peaks, long fiords stretching toward the wilderness, spectacular beauty hiding areas of desiccated hope and increasing despair. (25)

Later in the book - Nora, my protagonist, walks down a street in Grant’s Landing, the

fictional town near their cabin, and hears a naturalist talking about

pollution:

“How many friends and neighbors now have mysterious ailments? How do you feel in the mornings? Do you wake up tired? The woman waved her pen in the air. “The sludge the mill gives the Grant’s Landing park is polluted. When they offer it to you as examples of the mill’s generosity, don’t accept it. That sludge poisons our land. The poison moves up the food chain into our bodies. And that’s not all. When the Grant’s Landing mill burn its hog fuel made of sea soaked wood, the carbon and the salt combine to make dioxin. All that coats our lungs, making them stiff and heavy.”

The crowd was rapt., silent , as the woman went on. “Mills are using thousands of gallons of water every hour of every day. They tell us they can’t use less, as it would make heavier concentration of chemicals in the effluent. Hear that? The mills complain that closed

water systems cost money. Weigh those costs.

“...But you don’t want to listen to a lecture from me. Make your own decisions. The future of Grant’s landing depends on all of us working together. Join us.”

What’s your next project or what are you working on now?

I have another novel waiting for approval from a publisher, New Beginnings B&B and another novel , Connecting, almost ready to send out. Both are different from Long Reach, more family sagas than environmental mysteries.

Here are the Buy Links for Long Reach, followed by Nancy's contact information.

Buy Links:

Amazon: Long Reach

Barnes & Noble: Long Reach

My Website: https://nancywriter.com/store/long-reach-paper-back/

Social Contacts:

Website: Http://nancywriter.com

Email: stevensonnancy04@gmail.com

Thank you, Nancy, for being by guest today. Any questions or comments for Nancy?

Headed to Another World

With Halloween just around the corner, this is a good time to talk to a fantasy author. My guest today is author S. J. Carson, who has a new book out that sounds perfect for the season.

S.J. is an author and poet based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She holds degrees from Stanford and Boston Universities. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in both online and print journals. Aveline is her first novel. Let's find out more about S.J. and her new book.

S.J., what do you enjoy about being an author?

My favorite part of being an author is that I get to live a second life through my writing. I love that I can escape my ordinary existence at any time by disappearing into a fantasy world that I created.

What advice do you have for beginning writers?

First, write what excites you, not necessarily what you think will be popular or what other people tell you that you should write. When you’re first starting out, write to please the most important audience you’ll ever have—yourself. 

Second, be patient with yourself as you develop your craft; mastery doesn’t come overnight. Learn to be tolerant of failure and uncertainty. Not all your ideas will work out, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on your writing dreams.

Third, don’t compare yourself too much to other writers. While it’s okay to have high literary ambitions, of course, it’s not productive to beat yourself up over someone else’s success. In the wise words of Mary Schmich, “Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.”

Tell us about your road to publication.

From the time I was a child, I knew I wanted to be a published author. But it took a long time for me to get there. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in creative writing with an emphasis on poetry. After many years as a poet, I decided to teach myself how to write fiction, and I completely fell in love with it. I also pursued a career in law, but I managed to find time between classes and in the evenings to work on my various fiction manuscripts. 

In 2019, I began writing the manuscript that would become Aveline, my first published novel. The same year, I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Las Vegas, where I joined Sin City Writers Group (SCWG). When I finally finished the manuscript in early 2023, I began bringing it chapter by chapter to our weekly workshops. My fellow SCWG writers were instrumental in helping me develop the storyline and characters. 

One writer, R.H. Bird, told me that his publisher, The Wild Rose Press, was seeking young-adult dystopian novels, and he encouraged me to submit my manuscript. Later in 2023, I was honored to receive a publishing contract for Aveline. The novel was just released on October 9, 2024, and is now available for purchase.

What is your book that you will feature today and how did you come up with the idea to write it?

Aveline is a dystopian adventure novel geared toward a young-adult (12-18) audience, but its themes of loyalty, friendship, and courage in the face of governmental oppression will appeal to readers of all ages. 

The book centers on Aveline Fleur, a young heroine who will stop at nothing to save the ones she loves from a corrupt dictatorship—which happens to be run by her own family. When we meet her at the beginning of the story, Aveline has been relentlessly bullied, and she doesn’t think of herself as strong or brave. However, she begins to develop those qualities as she embarks on a journey that takes her far from home and immerses her in a world of danger. 

The novel began as a short story that I started writing in 2012. The main characters were Allyn Fleur, the government’s propaganda minister, and her daughter Aveline. Allyn’s greatest ambition is to completely control their country, Alterra, and make the people bend to her will. Aveline, on the other hand, is a normal preteen who just wants to have fun with her friends and find her place in the world. She has no idea that her future teeters on a knife’s edge because of her mother’s evil plans. 

The story was fun to write, but it didn’t have a very strong plot. I worked on it periodically over the years while trying to write other manuscripts. Then, in the beginning of 2019 while going through a stressful time at work, I decided that maybe this story could become a full-length novel. I liked its themes, and it had all the right ingredients to become a bigger narrative, so I decided to give it a shot.  

What a great writing story! Let's get a blurb:

For thirteen-year-old Aveline Fleur, a child of Alterra’s ruling house, life is pretty much perfect. She attends private school, owns a horse, and lives on an enormous estate where she and her best friend Bruno run wild. But when she discovers that her family is involved in a sinister plot to brainwash people who speak out against the regime—and that Bruno and his mother are in danger—Aveline must summon the courage to save herself and her friends before it’s too late.

How about an excerpt?

“Um, Elton?” Aveline called. “I think we missed our turn.”

She expected the driver to wink at her in the rearview mirror, as he always did, and tell her that his morning cup of coffee hadn’t kicked in yet.

But he was silent.

“Elton, you’ve got to turn around! I’m going to be late for school! If my mother finds out, she’ll have my head on a platter!”

In response, however, he pressed a button that drew a blackout shade across the glass partition between them.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

But that was not all. The safety locks clicked shut. She tugged at the handle of the door closest to her seat but couldn’t open it. She slid to the other door. Exactly the same.

She scurried to the front of the passenger compartment, where she knelt on the seat and knocked on the partition.

“Elton!”

No answer. As she turned to the window to see where they were, and where they were headed, she found that she could not. All the windows, which were tinted to begin with, quickly turned opaque. How was that even possible from the press of a button? 

Her stomach plummeted like an elevator in freefall. It was now so dark inside the compartment that she couldn’t even see her own hand in front of her face. She felt around the door for the power window controls, but when she found the correct buttons and pressed them, the windows wouldn’t budge. With both fists, she banged again on the partition.

“Elton, can you hear me? Please . . . stop the car! Let me out!”

When he didn’t reply, she began to panic. Like a trapped animal, she pounded on the windows and doors, groped frantically around the compartment for something she could use to break the glass. From her backpack she dug out a heavy textbook and threw it against one of the windows, but it merely bounced off and tumbled to the floor.

Of course the glass won’t break. These windows are bulletproof.

She even tried pulling down the backseat, hoping she could crawl into the trunk and escape from there. But the heavy leather seat wouldn’t budge. Her breathing quickened, and cold sweat dripped from under her arms and down her sides.

This is the punishment Uncle Simon was going to “think on” last night.

Surely Simon had bribed the driver. Or . . . maybe Elton was working for the Stam. Kindly old Elton, who would have punched the bullies in the nose if she’d asked him to. She never would have suspected him of being in the Stam’s pocket. Then again, she wouldn’t have suspected her uncle or her mother of disappearing people either.

Everyone’s loyal until they’re not. 

Wow! Aveline sounds like an exciting read!  Its buy links can be found below along with S.J.'s contact information.

S.J., what’s your next project or what are you working on now?

Right now, I’m working on my second book, Third Moon. I like to describe it as Brave New World meets Gattaca, with a dash of Bridgerton.

Third Moon is set on the planet Ceres X, where each citizen is assigned a “genetic fitness score” at birth that cannot be changed, thus creating a rigid class system. What happens when Kat, a young woman from the lowest class, falls for Cynfael, a young man from the highest? Can they overcome the obstacles in their path to love, or will societal expectations tear them apart?

Aveline Buy Links:

• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBM66T3X/

• Full list of buy links: https://wildrosepress.com/product/aveline/

Social Media Contact Information:

• Author Website: https://sjcarson.com/

• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216994105-aveline

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorsjcarsonofficial/

• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sjcarsonauthor

• Twitter/X: x.com/SJCarsonAuthor

 Thank you, S.J., for being my guest today. Any questions or comments for S.J.?

The Magic of The Season

The calendar says October and that means it's time for the witches, ghosts and goblins as well as magic to come out. That's exactly what we're doing today in My Writing Corner. My guest is Zach Stivers who has a book which just came out that sounds like it's perfect for the season. 

Zach and his wife live in central Virginia, at the foot of the Shenandoah National Park. He says they love to hike in the woods with their dogs and then stop off for a drink or two at the local brewery. He has a degree in English Literature from Florida State University, runs slow half-marathons, and says he leads an overly-competitive book club that reads a book a week … or else!  His newest book that we are featuring today is The Witches of Claw and Fang.

Let's get a blurb: 

Welcome to the cozy mountain town of Pineville, Virginia. It’s autumn, the leaves are gold and orange, the apples are crisp and sweet, town residents are going missing, and a bloodthirsty monster with ten-inch claws is loose in the forest. 

Morgan Reaves tries her damndest NOT to use magic. That’s why she hid in Pineville, after all. But now, Morgan needs to dust off her spell-casting skills, ASAP. Problem is, she may have lost her touch. She has another problem, too, and it smells like wet dog. Max: AKA the naked man with rip-cord tight muscles that stumbled out of the woods near Morgan’s house, ranting about curses and conspiracies and a coven of witches. Is he a werewolf? Well, yes. But he’s also the only one who can help her defeat whatever evil is threatening her adopted hometown. That is, if they manage to not kill each other first...

Want to know more? I do! Let's get a book excerpt: 

The car jolted sideways, knocking Morgan's legs out behind her, wrenching the breath out of her lungs. A massive hand gripped her ankle, yanked her upward and tossed her haphazardly into the air. She crashed into the lawn some twenty yards away, her skull bouncing hard off the ground. She blinked. She was in the middle of the lawn.

How was she in the middle of the lawn?

Joey yelped. She looked over as a massive furry brown thing slapped Joey halfway across the yard. Bear, she thought, in a detached, concussed sort-of-way, but it was clearly not a bear.

It was taller and thinner than a bear and it looked more wolf than bear and it looked more demonic than either wolf or bear and it glared at her with ferocious golden eyes. It took a step toward her, and she could see it had a thick scar running up its ribs onto its neck, could see sinewy muscles under brown fur, could see absurdly large white teeth inside a snarling lupine mouth. Could see a torn piece of her mail haphazardly dangling from its sickeningly large, clawed hands.

A scream got stuck in her throat.

Fear flooded her mind. She knew she needed to act, but she felt pressed frozen into the ground.

Joey found his courage before she did, leaping towards the monster. The beast lunged at the dog.

“No!”

She pushed out her hands, fingers dancing, wrists snapping with an instinctual twist. The wind gusted behind her, and she heard a musical sizzling zap and the demon-wolf-thing yelped and leapt back, fleeing for the woods. Morgan ran for the front door, pulling the keys from her sweater pocket.

“Joey, come!”

She fumbled at the deadbolt. She tried the wrong key at first in her panic, flipped and flipped the key chain around, almost dropped the key chain completely, found the right key, jammed it at the door and it bounced off the hole and then it bounced off the hole again and she knew the beast-monster must be emerging from the woods by now, surely it was coming for her, blood-red slobber dripping off its fangs, and she realized she still was using the wrong key and she groaned and then she found it, the correct key, finally—thank god—but her hands trembled and the key wouldn’t slide in the hole, and then the keys slipped out from her sweaty fingers and they dropped onto the deck, and then, as if in slow motion, gravity pulled them through a crack between the wood planks and the blackness under the deck consumed them.

Focus.

She heard rustling in the woods.

Joey began barking again at her side.

It’s coming.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

She pressed two fingers against the keyhole, extended her other hand out into the air, flicked her fingers, and visualized the lock turning.

Remember.

Remember the old ways.

Remember what your father forbid.

The door unlocked.

Yikes, I'm hooked, but you'll have to buy the book to find out what happens! Here are the 

Buy Links:

Amazon:

The Witches of Claw and Fang eBook : Stivers, Zach : Kindle Store

Barnes & Noble:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-witches-of-claw-and-fang-zach-stivers/1146027139?ean=9781509256860

Wild Rose Press:

https://wildrosepress.com/product/the-witches-of-claw-and-fang/

And if you would like to know more about Zach, here is his social media info:

Social Media:

@AuthorZach on TikTok

                              @zachstivers on Insta

                              www.zachstiverspublications.com

Thank you, Zach, for being my guest today. Any questions or comments for Zach?