The Next Big Thing

I was nominated by Jane Risdon to be THE NEXT BIG THING. Jane is a fellow writer who hails from England. We have been in several writing groups together and we encourage each other to do our best work. Writing can be lonely without knowing other writers who share similar struggles and joys in the writing life.



What kind of books do you like to read?

 I will read anything from dry textbooks to exciting suspense stories and everything in between. I have an odd love of bibliographies, and love scouring the backs of nonfiction books to find interesting reads. A couple of my favorites are always on my nightstand. How to be Idle and How to be Free by Tom Hodgekinson. These are my comfort food, when i have had a trying day I reread passages from these books as I fall asleep. Not exactly sure why these two books speak to me so much but they do, and have for years. They are nonfiction and meaty and full of ideas, quotes and excerpts from other books and history. If I had to pick the genre i most often read it would be mysteries, especially ones that are part of a series. It started with Agatha Christie and has never stopped.



Why do you like mysteries?

 I like mysteries because you uncover people's hidden reasons for doing things. In real life I tend to be naive and take things people say as absolute truth. and I think they are like a puzzle, and justice usually prevails, if only real life were like that.

When did you start writing?

I started in elementary school and have never stopped. The only problem was that my stories were always chosen to be read aloud by teachers and i was dreadfully shy and reserved. Part of me was thrilled that my teachers loved my stories, the other part of me was mortified that i was getting noticed when i tried my best to be invisible. i also read voraciously once i learned how and i have never slowed down.


What are you currently writing?

I generally have several projects of different length going at once.  All the Men are Dying, a book i am writing for National Novel Writers Month. In it a group of women who know each other from a church are persuaded to start a women's grief support group by the local priest. They reluctantly begin and the stories they tell have chilling similarities that they were until then unaware of. As they each begin to question each other they start suspecting foul play is involved and one of them is the culprit. The question is which one of them is fabricating new facts today to cover their tracks.

I am also revising a full length novel, Without a Net that i completed recently as well as several short stories and short competition pieces.

I also enjoy writing short pieces on people i meet that most people might think are not that compelling. i find inspiration in these people, and at times we never speak but i love to people watch. i notice things and wonder about the story behind these seemingly ordinary lives , and it propels me to document it so i will never forget those chance encounters.

Is it difficult for you to share your writing and to put it out there so publicly?
I am no longer so shy or reserved but it was still challenging to consider myself a writer, seemed rather presumptuous. After all, there is no license or certification test to prove you are a writer. Finally i accepted that those who consider their writing as central to their lives then they are certainly writers.
I would say i have progressed in small steps to sharing my work. my first writing class outside of my standard education was scary at first, reading my word aloud, having it critiqued, and commented on. Then i saw how much my writing improved as i took those risks and now i am rather fearless about sharing it.

Have you been published?

A short mystery story of mine called Pungent Death was recently included in an anthology called A Quiet Blue Wheel. It is currently available at Amazon.com

How important are other writers, classes, groups and so on for your development as a writer?
 
I would say more than anything else besides actually sitting there putting words on paper that immersing myself with books, writers at all stages, classes and writing groups has fostered my greatest growth.  the internet has been a gift to many lonely writers who need others who have been there. sharing frustrations and triumphs small and large builds strong bonds and support for those who are not fortunate to live in places with large populations of writers.


Again, I'd like to thank Jane Rison for nominating me. Jane has many irons in the fire at the moment 
http://janerisdon.wordpress.com
Please check out Jane's recent publication http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Woman-Anthology-Anthologies-ebook/dp/B00817P8DI 
and her recent short story http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/short-story-saturday-story-001-a-walk-to-destiny-by-jane-risdon


More about Me
I studied for a master of divinity for five years at Bangor Theological Seminary. I have worked as a restaurant manager, office furniture consultant, and briefly as a hospital chaplain. I have given sermons, officiated at church services ,delivered eulogies and organized a writing retreat at a monastery among other things. I have a passion for England that started when i lived there briefly at seventeen years of age, and it has not abated. i love British television and nothing besides a good book comforts me more than a good English television series.

My nominations are:

Rasheeda Ali-Ramjattan an inspirational writer from the sunny island of Trinidad where there are gorgeous beaches and plenty of sunshine. Rasheeda started writing as a teenager and inspires many people with her peaceful and joyful wisdom.
www.mysacredinspirations.wordpress.com 


Kaileigh Deacon who has built up an impressive amount of work at a young age. She has worked at a bookstore, writes for the Calais Advertiser, and is hard at work reviewing books, reading copiously and writing. Currently she is working on a novel for National Novel Writing Month and has reached 40, 000 words thus far.
http://kaileigh-confessionsofabook-a-holic.blogspot.com/


Nadia Faydh is an English professor at the College of Arts in Baghdad, Iraq.  Nadia has studied Irish Poetry extensively and writes poetry. This is her tenth year teaching undergraduate students in the department of English language. She spent the last decade of her life discussing and arguing about novels, poems, plays and literary theories written in English with students who barely know how to read this foreign language. Her poetry is quite personal in context, but almost most of her themes are the things we have lost or missed. only by talking them out in poems she can have them again, or live again their memories.

http://nfaydh.blogspot.com

 

Mark Richardson has studied archeology, boats, naval history and theology to name a few areas. He is  working on a memoir - travel piece about the Penobscot River.  He has also done some preliminary work on a biography of John Lloyd Stephens, the 19th century American travel writer and adventurer, but that would be a commitment for 5 years at least, so I'm still not sure. My main focus, however, is on a thriller (we used to call them action-adventure novels or suspense novels). I was thinking about it the other day: there have been plenty of American writers in this genre, but I've always tended to enjoy the Brits. I grew up on the works of Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean and Douglas Reeman. Later, I moved on to Jack Higgins and Ken Follett. Not quite what my professors meant by BritLit, but in my case it's what I enjoyed.
http://tomezone.blogspot.com/