Velda E Brotherton, click
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Blogs by Velda E Brotherton
Running Faster Than I can 11/17/2006 1:39:33 PM
Playing catch-up often find this writer bogged down One thing I know for sure, I need to be younger and I need to be at least two people, maybe more. I promised an article in this spot about Nefarious Heroes of Arkansas last July. You wouldn't believe what has happened to me since then. Yeah, I know excuses, excuses.
First place, I sold a book. Yeah, after three dry years as far as books go (five shorts stories published though) I finally broke the jinx, if that's what it was.
My historical fiction career tumbled with the fall of many New York publishers, and since then I've sought another outlet for my words. Yeah, six novels published made little difference. Caught in the middle as it were, I changed gears. Wrote a creative non-fiction that I'd been wanting to write for several years. This summer Fly With The Mourning Dove found a home with Publish America.
Now, I want to explain something about this publisher. Many writers out there for some reason think Publish America is a subsidy or vanity press. Not true. I suppose they have that reputation because they publish so darn many books when all other publishers are drawing back. Their writers win awards, get good reviews, and sell their books. PA pays royalties, distributes books nationwide and worldwide, sells through Amazon, Barnes & Noble online, plus at all bookstores. They create gorgeous covers with the author included in the loop. And they are offering a publishing home to many writers who lost everything to the great New York downfall. What else is required to be a publisher?
At any rate, I'm pleased to have my book with them. It is in the editing process as I write this, with a release date not yet announced, but sometime in the first half of 2007.
Watch this spot for how I came to write this book, what and who and where inspired me and a peek into its pages.
The story is one of courage, determination, strength and love, and it is all true but told so the reader is drawn into the lives of these brave people who homesteaded on the high desert of New Mexico right after WW I on land without water but with a breathtaking view of the Sangre de Cristos mountain range to the east and the San Juan range to the west. These people grew with New Mexico when early artists were finding homes in Taos and Santa Fe. They saw the taming of a land so severe, so challenging that up to that time had seen only Hispanics and American Indians able to survive.
My story is about a young Anglo girl, six-year-old Edna Smith, who first lays eyes on New Mexico on a dark, bitterly cold night when she is carried, wrapped in blankets, to the homestead by her parents in a mule-drawn wagon. She spends her entire life living on and loving the sage brush flats of her home, and today, at 92 owns and manages that ranch plus one the family later bought in Colorado. This is her story told to me, and I have tried to faithfully reconstruct it all, the characters she met along the way, and the things that happened to her.
See you back here with more soon.
