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?