Author Melinda Clayton returns to Appalachia for her new novel

I’m pleased to welcome author Melinda Clayton (Appalachian Justice and Return to Crutcher Mountain) to the Round Table today to talk about her new novel Entangled Thorns. Once again, Clayton heads back to Appalachia for a compelling story about hard times and hard memories. Entangled Thorns, which tells the story of Beth Sloan and the “infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia,” was released by Vanilla Heart Publishing June 27, 2012.

Malcolm: Like Appalachian Justice and Return to Crutcher Mountain, your new novel Entangled Thorns has an Appalachian setting. What draws a Florida author away from the orange groves and sunny beaches into the hills of West Virginia for her storytelling?

Melinda:  My mother’s family is from West Virginia, around the Charleston area.  My grandfather was retired from the mines.  Both of my maternal grandparents passed away when I was a teen, but up until that time we visited every summer.  I loved everything about it:  the people, the mountains, the wildlife.  My mother was born in a tiny place called Big Ugly Holler, which served as the inspiration for Cedar Hollow.  It doesn’t exist now, but we once hiked into the mountains to see what was left of it.  There was no road; by that time, there wasn’t even a trail.  When we finally reached our destination all that remained of Big Ugly Holler were a few foundations and chimneys covered in vines.

Malcolm: In Entangled Thorns, your protagonist Beth Sloan has been running from and/or repressing her troubled childhood until circumstances force her to confront it. Your protagonists in Appalachian Justice and Return to Crutcher Mountain were also wounded as children. Does this overarching theme of your work come out of your experience as a psychotherapist or the kinds of stories you’re drawn to on the nightly news?

Melinda:  I love this question, and the answer is, “both.”  I read a book when I was very young – I’d give anything to remember the title of it – but it was about a social worker who worked with troubled kids.  Ever since then I knew I wanted to work with troubled children and families in some capacity.  I’ve also always been drawn to true crime stories, as morbid as that might seem.  There is something about the workings of the human mind that absolutely fascinates me, particularly when it goes off-kilter in some way.

Malcolm: You recently completed a Ed.D. in Special Education Administration program which required a dissertation. How did you manage to jump back and forth between academic writing with its reliance on sources and a formal style to fiction with its emphasis on people, adventure and an accessible style?

Melinda:  That was a little challenging at times.  The act of writing fiction was a great stress reliever, but I had to work to keep the informal language (contractions, slang, etc.) from entering my academic writing.  It was tempting at times to put in something like, “This research will show that there ain’t no correlation…” for the pure fun of seeing my committees’ reaction.

Malcolm: How does the doctoral work fit into your professional goals?

Melinda:  My ultimate goal is to teach at a college level.  My doctorate sort of combined two fields of study, since my M.S. is in Community Agency Counseling, and my doctorate is in Special Education Administration.  I’d love to contribute to the field by demonstrating how the two fields often go hand-in-hand and should support each other and work together, instead of arguing over funding streams and services as so often happens.

Malcolm: For the general public, Appalachia conjures up such themes as isolated, subsistence living, hard-working and persevering people, coal mining and other environmental excesses, and pure, raw music unlike that from any other part of the country. How do your characters and plots mesh with or run counterpoint to these stereotypes? Does the lure of Appalachia for your storytelling ever translate into other areas, say, in tempting you to move there as a teacher or psychotherapist?

Melinda:  It’s a delicate line to walk.  I know from my own family that the manner in which Appalachia is often portrayed can be a sore point.  At the same time, I want the story to reflect what is, in some areas, true to life.  I relied heavily on not only my research, but also my own memories as well as my mother’s experiences.

I also know from my experiences that the poverty associated with Appalachia exists elsewhere.  There’s no need to travel to Appalachia to encounter it.  In the late 1980s, when I was fresh out of college with a B.A. in social work, my first job was as the coordinator of case management services for a rural mental health center in Tennessee.  My case workers and I were responsible for a three county area, working with the most impoverished of families. Many of our clients were without electricity or running water.  Many also lived in the most basic of housing structures, without floors or internal walls.  I think it’s difficult to believe there are still families living in such poverty in the U.S., but there are.

Malcolm: Thomas Wolfe brought the phrase “You Can’t Go Home Again” into general use. “Going home” can be awkward, embarrassing or frightening on so many levels even for those of us who had relatively normal childhoods. But your characters had strong reasons for avoiding home, yet all of them find that they must go home again. Does this theme grow out of the psychologist’s seemingly favorite “well me about your childhood” question or is it more that home is the only place where the issues of home can be fixed?

Melinda:  Again I have to smile, because it’s both.  My writing of home is a very transparent attempt to create the home I miss.  Until I was about twelve, we lived in my father’s hometown in TN surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.  We had fried chicken at Mawmaw’s house every Sunday after church, then spread blankets on the lawn under the pecan tree and visited well into the evening.  A rough couple of years ended all that.  One aunt died tragically in a car accident, another divorced, my grandparents lost their home to a fire, and my family moved away.  I’m sure it wasn’t as idyllic as I remember, but it’s pulled at me ever since.

But I also think it’s necessary to revisit the places that have scarred us, either symbolically (often for safety’s sake only symbolically) or physically.  We have to face our issues before we can resolve them.  Burying them doesn’t work; we have to excise them, examine them, and then choose to heal and move on.

Malcolm: Thank you, Melinda.

Where to Find Melinda on the Internet

Blogs on Xanga and WordPress

Facebook

Twitter

Amazon Author’s Page

If you’re not a reader, for Pete’s sake, stop trying to be a writer

When I taught college-level journalism, I was convinced that some of my reporting and feature writing students never read newspapers.

Other than wondering what the hell they were doing in my classroom, it was clear to me that those who didn’t read the news would probably never learn how to write it. News and feature stories have a noticeable organization and style.

Long-time journalists can hear the cadence of a “properly written” news story inside their heads. Stands to reason, then, that reading—in this case, the news—will help you learn the fundamentals of reporting much faster in a classroom and on the job than being clueless about it.

Aspiring poets and novelists who don’t read poems and novels

Author and editor C. Hope Clark (“Lowcountry Bribe”) wrote in a February 28th post at read.learn.write that in her consulting and speaking work, she finds a lot of aspiring writers who seldom read:

The world abounds with writers. Everyone wants his name, photo and title on a bookstore shelf, as a minimum on Amazon. But amazingly enough, most of them are not voracious readers. They are spitting out words, but taking few in. It’s like using a shotgun instead of a high-powered rifle. The result isn’t very refined, the results less satisfactory.

Some years ago, when desktop publishing programs made it easier to create newsletters, brochures, and posters on a PC screen, a lot of big corporations cut the writers from their staffs because—the bean counters seasoned—anyone could use the software and create something that looked like a newsletter, brochure or poster. Who needed actual writers? The results were a mess, and since the bean counters never read anything anyway, they didn’t know the results were a mess.

The Internet is (perhaps) today’s desktop publishing

The Internet has not only reduced our attention spans, it’s given all of us the power to create materials that look like e-zines, blogs, books, magazine articles and poems. No experience necessary. Simply log on and create.  Clark says that “The slogan ‘reading is fundamental’ is remarkably accurate. Somewhere along the line, however, between elementary school and college, reading falls by the wayside. Teaching to tests, however, and not enticing children to fall in love with words, has stolen their ability to perform later in life.”

As a writer, I’m biased: I think all of us need to learn how to read and then not let the skill get away from us. And, we’re talking novels, essays, commentaries, features and criticism here, not just the back of the cereal box or the “Trending Now” links on the Yahoo screen. Having worked in corporate America, I can testify to the fact that a lot of stuff got screwed up because the people reading the reports and white papers and trade magazine article weren’t really getting it. They skimmed and/or couldn’t follow a logical argument in print.

What do I have to do to become a writer?

The Internet, and that includes a few well-known print-on-demand book publishers, gives the impression the answer is nothing. Just put one word after another until you reach the required word count for a short story or a book, format it, and you’re done. And when nobody reads it, the first thing you’ll hear from “the writer” is the accusation that there’s a conspiracy out there. Amazon, BIG PUBLISHING, the government, the search engines, the service providers and the reviewers had nothing better to do that get together in a bar and decide to stomp down some a book that otherwise would have won the Booker, Nobel, and Pulitzer prizes.

The speculation about “What the hell happened to my book?” seldom includes any need to learn the art and craft of writing first. And this goes back to something very fundamental: Reading. That’s where becoming a writer starts, and it never stops.

–Malcolm

Vanilla Heart Publishing at Deltona, Florida Book Fair October 15th

A Baker’s Dozen of authors from my publisher Vanilla Heart Publishing (VHP) will be represented at the Deltona, Florida 2nd Annual Author Book Fair, Celebrating Writers and Readers!

Saturday, October 15, from 11 to 3, the Deltona Florida Regional Library will host its second Annual Authors Book Fair – Celebrating Writers and Readers at at 2150 Eustace Ave, Deltona 32725. The book fair attracted 70 authors last year and served as an introduction to authors and poets in Florida or those who call Central Florida readers their audience.

Prior to the general session are two workshops at 8:45 and 9:45 geared to the interests of writers and budding authors:

8:45 am           7 Steps for a Wildly Successful Book Tour  presented by  Liz Coursen,  Sarasota      author of “The Complete Biography Workbook” who will just have completed  an 81-event book tour.

9:45 am           Pamela Starr, Regional Development Director for Constant Contact will be conducting a social media workshop entitled: How (and why) to incorporate social media into your marketing strategy.

These workshops are open to the public and are $10 each or 2/$15 payable at the door.

The Friends of the Library offers special thanks to corporate sponsors TD Bank, Infinity Insurance and Office Depot. Also returning this year is the popular meet and green hosted by Ruby Tuesday to which all authors and sponsors are invited.

VHP Authors Angela Kay Austin, Anne K. Albert, Charmaine Gordon, Celle Cordero, Collin Kelley, L.E. Harvey, Malcolm R. Campbell, Marilyn Celeste Morris, Melinda Clayton, Robert Hays, S.R. Claridge, Smoky Trudeau Zeidel, and Victoria Howard and their most recent novels, will all be represented at the Vanilla Heart Publishing booths, spaces 34 and 35, with giveaways, specials, and prizes.

Vanilla Heart Publishing Day

On July 25th, author Smoky Trudeau Zeidel (“On the Choptank Shores” and “The Cabin”) will host a Vanilla Heart Publishing Day on her book review site.

Stop by for writing and book information and (hopefully) a laugh or two with authors Malcolm R. Campbell, Vila Spiderhawk, Robert Hays, Melinda Clayton, S R Claridge, Collin Kelley, Charmaine Gordon, Marilyn Celeste Morris, and Janet Lane Walters. Learn to like the authors; learn to love their books.

She asks great questions, and I enjoyed taking part in the fun.

–Malcolm

Authors who connect with readers

“Funny how people are. Known for books that can make people pass out from nausea, Chuck Palahniuk in person is a gracious, sweet guy who really connected with the crowd at our event last Tuesday. He spent two to three minutes with each person who was getting a book signed, asking them questions and posing for pictures.” — Tom at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH

Don’t you wish it were always like this?

Not passing out from nausea while reading a novel, but meeting an author at a book signing who is genuinely glad you’re there.

After all, you’re giving up an afternoon or an evening. Perhaps it took you 30-40 minutes to get to the store and it will take you another 30-40 minutes to drive home.

Maybe you planned to buy the book anyway or maybe you heard something during the reading that caught your interest and you fished out a credit card and bought the book on an act of faith. At this point, I think you deserve more than an assembly-line book signing experience. We’ve all been to these and we’ve seen them on TV.

Sure, if 1000 people are lined up and the end of the line is five blocks away, the author–or, the store, at least–can’t afford a five minute chat per person. But how about a smile, a handshake, and a few questions about you? That shows an author is glad you’re there as contrasted with those who take you, your book reading experience, and your credit card for granted.

Good show, Chuck Palahniuk and RiverRun Bookstore.

Read the book, then visit Glacier and discover the magic again.

Author Interviews from Visual Arts Junction

Shelagh Watkins, author of Mr. Planemaker’s Flying Machine, has compiled and published a book of author interviews conducted during the past year at Visual Arts Junction. The authors discuss their styles and influences as well as recent works, excerpts of which are included.

This Mandinam Press book can be viewed or downloaded free in multiple formats at Smashwords or purchased as a paperback via Lulu.

It was a pleasure being included in this volume with authors Pat Bertram, D. K. Christi, Caryn Gottlieb FitzGerald, Jean Holloway and others. Watkins’ hope is that “the interviews will entertain and inspire readers to find out more about the authors and their books.”
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As 2009 winds down, I would like to thank those who have found adventure and magic in The Sun Singer, humor in Jock Sterwart and the Missing Sea of Fire, and yarns and tall tales in A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories. Best wishes for an exciting 2010 which, I hope, will include an infinite stack of books on your desk and nightstand.

Malcolm

You’re not an author, you’re my mom

Today’s guest article is by Chelle Cordero, author of “Bartlett’s Rule,” “Forgotten,” “Within the Law,” “Courage of the Heart,” “Final Sin,” “Hostage Heart,” and “A Chaunce of Riches.” It’s a pleasure to welcome a prolific author from Vanilla Heart Publishing with a humorous take on the writing life.

You’re not an author, you’re my mom

by

Chelle Cordero

Working as a writer is a hectic and often surreal lifestyle. You live by the power of words, both real and fictional, and you accept the responsibility of those words, the emotions they evoke and the lessons they convey. Although I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo (a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days) I can well understand the thrill of accomplishment. Every time I finish an article, a new novel, or edit a writing project, I am thrilled with the same sense of accomplishment.

It’s an amazing feeling to see your name on the cover of a book or see your byline in a national publication. As awesome as it feels to see your name, it is incredible to realize that people are actually reading your words. I’ve had an editor or two (for my non-fiction work) pass along letters they’ve received citing my articles and commenting that they found the information useful; that’s a wonderful feeling. Even more exciting is seeing a site like Amazon taking pre-orders of novels that haven’t yet been released (the ranking system shows that pre-orders have been placed) – people are actually buying books because I’ve written them and they are getting them as soon as they are available.

I’m still me. I am a wife, mother, community volunteer, housewife, sister, aunt, and friend as well as being a writer. I walk in the mall and I’m not hounded by fans because most people don’t recognize me as an author. Every so often I do get someone noticing my author pic on the back of a book and realizing it’s me or an email to me as a writer asking for advice on writing. My friends and acquaintances do call me if they see my name in the paper or the time I did a spot on a local news channel (as a participant in Operation E-Book Drop).

I often read and re-read my own articles and books and sit there thinking “I really wrote that?” Most times I like what I’ve read, perhaps that is just egotism? I guess I am in that in-between stage where I know that I am just an ordinary everyday person and yet craving the acknowledgment of what I’ve accomplished to date. I yearn for fan mail (please! chellecordero@gmail.com) and yet I felt embarrassed the first time someone brought a book up to me at a signing and asked me to autograph it – and I didn’t even know the person!

There is a feeling that is difficult to put into words, even for a writer, which overwhelms you in a crowd where everyone is speaking about their jobs. Then they turn to you…

I’ve often had a thoughtful acquaintance turn to me and ask “So how is your book doing?” and I respond “Which one?” and they’re shocked. Or it’s even funnier when someone I’ve known for years suddenly realizes that I’m a writer – “You wrote a book?” There is no way of comparing my “desk job” with that of my son-in-law’s title as “Infrastructure Analyst” or to my kids’ EMS careers (she’s a paramedic and he’s an EMT).

I try to surround myself with other writer and editorial friends – we understand each other. Whether I connect with these friends on Facebook or in-person at my local RWA chapter, I feel “normal” because of the association. Most of the authors signed with my publisher, Vanilla Heart Publishing, are supportive and friendly, we have a tight group. My writer friends know when to call me on it when I make excuses and also know how to bolster my fragile ego when I need plaudits.

Then while I am feeling particularly talented and good about myself I over hear my daughter chatting with a friend and listing some of her favorite authors. I attempt a “guilt trip” –“What? My name isn’t included?” The answer I get is “You’re not an author, you’re my mom.”

…I chuckle and still feel pretty good.

Chelle Cordero, Author

Chelle Cordero Website

Chelle at Vanilla Heart Publishing

Pat Bertram, Gangsters, and ‘Daughter Am I’

Pat Bertram

Today I’m pleased to welcome Pat Bertram for a discussion about gangsters, personal quests and where in the world such ideas come from when we sit down to write a novel.

Pat is the author of More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and a new novel just released from Second Wind Publishing, Daughter Am I.

Here’s the publisher’s description of the novel: “When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents—grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born—she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted her dead. Along the way she accumulates a crew of feisty octogenarians—former gangsters and friends of her grandfather. She meets and falls in love with Tim Olson, whose grandfather shared a deadly secret with her great grandfather. Now Mary and Tim need to stay one step ahead of the killer who is desperate to dig up that secret.”

Malcolm: As a writer of Scot’s ancestry, I can’t help but notice that our latest novels both use the Stewart/Stuart name with alternative spellings. I chose Stewart as my protagonist’s last name in Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire because it’s a well- known Scot’s name. Did you name your in Daughter Am I Mary Stuart because that’s a historic Scottish name (Mary Queen of Scots) or because the name just seemed to fit the character?

Pat: Neither. I wanted to choose a non-Italian name to show that not all members of the Mob were Italians. The Sicilian Mafia was clannish and only allowed their own kind to become members, but the Jewish/Italian alliance known as the Mob or the Syndicate welcomed all nationalities. The Scottish aspect was an accident, though. I based my hero on Mary Stuart Masterson in Bed of Roses—I liked that she was smart and capable, yet tentative when it came to life and love. Mary Stuart was just supposed to be a working name until I got the character developed, but by that time, the name had become ingrained, and impossible to change.

Malcolm: There’s a story like this behind many fictional characters. I hadn’t thought about the fact that—as the Wall Street Journal once headlined—the Mob is an equal opportunity employer. You have described Daughter Am I as your “young woman/old gangster coming of age tale.” It’s a story I enjoyed immensely. To many people, the word “gangster” is term for really nasty criminals. But as I read your novel, I wasn’t seeing today’s version of gang-related criminals, nor the mean, old fashioned criminals made famous by the noir films of the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, I was finding con men of another era as popularized by the movie “The Sting.”

Pat: Very astute of you. Although the dates work out that the characters would have been in their prime in the 1940s and 1950s, they are based on bootleg era characters. It’s sort of ironic—the point of my writing the book was to demythologize the Mob, but I ended up perpetrating another myth—that the old-time gangsters were somehow better than those today. And maybe some of them were. During the depression, at times the only job a man or a boy could get was working for the mob.

Malcolm: Meanwhile, NASCAR keeps trying to disassociate themselves with their bootlegger origins. As for perpetuating new myths, that’s where a sequel comes in handy. The tone of my Jock Stewart novel is drawn somewhat from the style of the old, film noir movies featuring a detective with dark secrets and a lot of voice-over narration. I relied on my memory of those films more than I relied on film-noir reference books. But Daughter Am I features a string of old-time gangsters that it would have been hard to write about without being an old-time gangster or doing a lot of research.

Pat: Lots and lots of research, though not all of it is mine. I have an historian friend who has regaled me with tales of gangsters for many years. In fact, I got to the point where I couldn’t watch a gangster film with him because he’d keep up a running commentary about all the things the filmmaker got wrong, and I’d miss half the story. I did a lot of research myself, though, and it was a special joy when I discovered something he didn’t know! Most of the information isn’t on the internet, but resides in . . . gasp! . . . books.

Malcolm: While telling Mary what their lives were like, your characters also bring out a lot of information about the criminals of yesteryear which serves, in passing, to educate the audience.

Pat: All my books seem to have a character like Teach, my learned con man, who tends to be a lecturer. The hardest part of editing for me was to take out everything that wasn’t essential to understanding the story. I worry that Teach’s talk about the history of gold is a bit much, but there is no way to understand why the gold was buried without understanding the history of the era. I did try to space the lectures, though, to add a bit of suspense at times or to offer a respite from the action at other times.

Malcolm: You bring in an aspect of the country going off the gold standard that most people today are unaware of. There’s a lot of humor in the book in spite of the fact Mary’s life is in danger during her quest to learn more about her grandparents. First, here’s a rather straight-laced young woman riding around with gangsters whose idea of getting supplies if more to knock over a store than to go in and make purchases, but most of the people she meets have old-style nicknames which—for today’s ears—are rather funny.

Pat: I enjoyed coming up with the names. Some names I stole, like Kid Rags, which was the name of a 1900s gangster in Hell’s Kitchen, and others were inevitable, like the morbid wheelman named Happy. As for the humor—that too was inevitable. When you get together so many different characters, each with their own quirks, such as Kid Rags and his fondness for bourbon, it’s easy to be humorous. The disparity in age between Mary and the gangsters could have been a source for humor, but I chose to ignore that for the most part and went for the moral difference. The law breaking they took for granted was anathema to her.

You ended up with a lot of quirky names in your book, too: Jimmy Exlibris who never took his nose out of a book, Cotton Mouth the preacher, Hank Kruller the police chief. I like those.

Malcolm: In the Jock Stewart book, some of my characters names are puns. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Pat: I like the synchronicity of our main characters having basically the same surname. It’s fitting, since there are so many similarities in our books—both revolve around a crime, yet neither are strictly genre mysteries. Both have a romance at the heart, but neither could be classified as a romance. Both are humorous, though Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire is filled with puns, and Daughter Am I is pun-free. And both books are filled with quirky characters with quirky names.

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Join us here tomorrow for a discussion of the quest aspects of Daughter Am I. You can find the novel at Amazon and at Second Wind Publishing, LLC.

When Did the Realization “I Am an Author” Hit?

Author Pat Bertram (“More Deaths Than One” and “A Spark of Heavenly Fire”) wrote a post with this same title today. She’s been assisting her publisher, Second Wind, with projects while working on pre-publication publicity for “Daughter Am I” and on edits for “Light Bringer.” So today, the realization it: She feels like an author.

I left a comment on her post, saying that I felt more like a writer when I worked as a corporate communications director and a technical writer than I do now. Partly, that was because my work produced an income that made a difference to my family’s financial well being. Now, I can’t say that. On some days, I feel like writing is a very expensive hobby and I look at Pat Conroy who’s two years younger than I with another bestselling novel and I think, “there’s an author.” Most authors, though, remain obscure.

Many traditionally published books sell a thousand copies or less; most self-published books sell a hundred copies or less. The income produced is less than publicity costs. Hence, it becomes easy to say writing is a hobby–like having aquariums all over the house, a dozen stamp albums in the den, or a huge model train layout in the basement–because it uses up income while producing many interesting hours rather than paying the rent.

Yes, I am an author. Yes, I enjoy writing, planning novels, doing reviews, posting here on this web log, researching new project ideas, and keeping up with the profession. Yet, the reality of being an author is so much different than I expected when I looked ahead to my career when I was in high school. And, I think it’s probably a lot different than the public believes as well. For the public, if they’ve heard of you, you’re and author. If they haven’t, you’re not. The public is very blunt about whether one is or isn’t what he claims to be.

It comes down to self-satisfaction, then, being happy with what one is doing and feeling that the output, however obscure, is also what he is supposed to be doing. We all hope our books reach readers who will enjoy them and who might also derive value from them. But we’re seldom omniscient enough to know when and where that happens.

But we keep writing because–in our warped imagination–there’s no better way for us to spend our lives.

Malcolm

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Why I Write

It’s been quite obvious to me over the years that most people think writers are screwed up people.

While I’ve served on an aircraft carrier, run a locomotive, used a backhoe, driven spikes on a new RR roadbed, delivered papers, and been the voice you hear when you want computer phone support, this doesn’t cover up the fact that I’m a writer. Like Jack Palance in the movie “Shane,” I stop conversation when I come into a room. It’s not because everyone’s waiting for me to say something quotable, it’s because “regular people” see writers as different.

Variously, we are cursed, crazy, bookish, studious, libertine, bohemian, licentious, and ultra-left wing. Storytellers, like magicians, circus people, actors and patent medicine salesmen have always been seen as part of a con or a scam or the occult.

I see myself as none of these things, but it’s hard to shed the images in other people’s mind’s eye.

I see writing as a career like any other. While some writers become rich and famous, that’s not the norm. Most authors cannot earn a living from their novels. Like the rancher, insurance salesman, school principal, truck driver and computer programmer, I’m a working to support my family and maybe take a vacation once in a while.

My father was a writer, so that was an influence, just as the sons of ranchers and salesmen and teachers often step into their parents’ professions. It’s what they know and it’s what I know.

After people work a job for a while, they get better at it, and they learn tips and tricks for making it more meaningful to them in the context of their lives. Some people hang out in shops and break rooms; I hang out in libraries.

People in all professions believe that–even though they need to earn a living–the work they do is beneficial to the world, probably not the entire world, but to those they meet day to day. A friendly truck driver will stop when s/he sees your broken down car on the shoulder of an Interstate. A writer disseminates information and ideas s/he hopes will be of value, practically and/or spiritually.

My novel The Sun Singer is a case in point. First, I was writing what I know: mountains, hiking, climbing and a touch of mysticism. Such things can be entertaining and give readers a few hours of fun. But I also saw a deeper message in The Sun Singer, a path toward personal transformation that readers could either accept or reject without losing track of the entertainment value of the adventure story. I’m not a guru and wouldn’t want to be one. I don’t have the cosmic scheme of things figured out. But maybe I can say a few things that will help others to figure it out and get as close to the truth as they can. That’s everyone’s calling, isn’t it?

We’re all trying to make the world better while keeping food on the table.  The work is practical and spiritual. I try to live that in my life as a writer because it’s what I fell into, or possibly what I was led into. My best friend from high school fell into being a captain of tall ships that sail  around the world. What a unique profession that is, yet he sees me as the crazy one. Go figure. He sails and I write. It pays the bills and makes for a wonderful life.

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Coming February 19th

I‘m pleased to announce that Vivian Zabel, author of “Prairie Dog Cowboy,” will be here on February 19th to discuss her new book. What a wonderful story it is!

Four of the people  (within the U.S. and Canada) who stop by and ask a question or make a comment on my blog and/or the other blogs she is visiting will receive a canvas tote bag with Zabel’s 4RV Publishing logo.

While she’s here, please don’t act like writers are screwed up. Play like we’re a couple of ranchers.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell