Friday, September 12, 2008

‘Break-out’ novel published by Web site

By Larry Stroud Guard Associate Editor

Published: Friday, September 12, 2008

What does a young widow do when her husband is suddenly and cruelly taken out of her life?

Ila Clements knows.

As a young widow in Florida in the 1960s, she had to make the decision whether to sell the commercial fishing boat she and her husband had operated and find another way to make a living for herself and their young daughter, or continue in the fishing business.

Now a novelist living in Batesville, her book “The Lady Lobscouser” has just been published by Amazon.com and is available from the Amazon.com Web site.

Clements, however, points out that resemblances between her former situation and similar circumstances involving Selma, the heroine of her novel, are different.

Hers was real.

“This is a novel,” she said, which is her way of telling readers the book is fiction, not her life story.

However, she said, “I write what I know. She (Selma) carries a .30-30 (rifle). I carried a .30-30” because of danger from poachers and other situations, including local smuggling of illegal aliens from Cuba in the waters around the Florida Keys.

Selma gets embroiled with the transporting of illegal Cubans to American shores and with the Central Intelligence Agency. Two men also enter her life, and she has to make life-changing decisions.

A year ago, Clements entered her manuscript in the Amazon.com/Penguin Books Break-out Novelist Contest.

“They notified me that they had way over 20,000 entries,” she said. “They cut it to 5,000 and I had made the cut. Three months later, they notified me I made the 500 cut.

“Then they had a top three and I didn’t make that.”

Still, Amazon.com offered to publish “The Lady Lobscouser” for free if Clements would submit it in PDF form. However, the publisher would do no promotion — Clements would have to do that herself.

“It didn’t cost me anything to have it published,” Clements said.

So far, she’s personally sold 106 copies and another 18 have been purchased by Amazon.com customers.

Clements will have copies for sale at a book signing from 2:30 until 5 p.m. Saturday at Hastings Bookstore at 2360 Harrison St. in Batesville and at another signing, at the Paper Chase Book Store at 136 W. Main St., from 4 until 6 p.m. Thursday.

After the signings, both stores will stock the book for sale.

In her novel, Selma must make hard decisions after her husband Ward is found dead from an apparent accident.

Selma isn’t so sure it was an accident. “Something just didn’t ring true” in Selma’s mind, the author said.

Clements’ novel draws upon her skill and knowledge as a former commercial fisherman who along with her first husband, Kenneth Pate, built their 32-foot fishing boat and made their living on the water.

Being raised at North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound, she grew up working on her father’s fishing boat in the oyster business and trotlining crabs.

“I grew up in the seafood business,” she said.

“I tonged oysters, and at lunchtime I’d sit and eat crackers and raw oysters and drink Pepsi.”

The Pates worked at lobstering in the Keys and shrimping in various locations. Before they built their boat, Miss Anteris, her husband followed commercial fishing seasons along the coast from the Carolinas, around Florida and along the Gulf Coast to Texas.

She followed along by car, meeting him when he came ashore.

Tiring of the constant moving, they built the work boat at his father’s boat-building yard.

Her husband died from an illness at 32. At four years younger, she was 28. They had a young daughter, Carole.

Clements lasted only a few months in her solo fishing career, mostly because of poachers who stole her catches. “Many men did not want a woman in that business,” she said.

Clements became well acquainted with illegal aliens drifting over from Cuba.

“I saw people coming over on anything from an inner tube to them standing like cordwood in a little boat (so small and crowded) that if one sneezed, it would take on water,” she said.

During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, John Clements, originally from Batesville, was sent to Florida as a computer expert for the military. Eventually, he worked for years as a supervisor of computer control for  the launch center at Kennedy Space Center.

He and the novelist have been married for 39 years and have a daughter, Jeannie. Clements and her husband moved to Batesville six years ago.

In Florida, she watched shuttle launches up close and personal.

“I watched the Challenger blow up, standing in my back door,” she said. The announcer on television was still counting, but, she said, “I had already seen it (explode). He didn’t know yet what had happened.”

Clements said her novel is a quick read with several conflicts which the heroine has to resolve throughout the book. She said she didn’t let those conflicts or mysteries drag on, but handled them as they came up — with the exception, of course, of Selma’s husband’s “accidental” death.

“Ila, I just finished the ‘Lobscouser,’” reader Barbara Hall said by e-mail. “I could not put it down. I read it in one afternoon and night. I finished it about 12 a.m. I think it is one of the best books I have ever read. It was a fast read, no boring parts. Just a great book!

“I did find out what a lobscouser is. I don’t like 3 or 400 pages of mystery. This one had several, and man, were they exciting but they soon came to an end. Great. Can’t wait for the next one. B.”

“I don’t pretend to do literary writing,” Clements said. “I write things I think I would like to read and others would enjoy, relaxing and reading. I love to write and then I turn and enjoy reading what I have written.

“I want people to be able to feel and see the characters I write about. I want them to ‘be there.’”

She insisted the novel be published in 12-point type, large enough for easy reading. The large type caused the book to be 323 pages long.

Clements is also trying to market her other books, including five completed manuscripts that she calls “The Carolina Series,” to publishing houses.

“The Carolina Series,” set along the Carolina coast between the years 1868 and the early 1970s, includes “Love in Carolina,” “Deception in Carolina,” “Living Well in Carolina,” “Return to Carolina” and “Dawn in Carolina.”

She is also marketing another of her novels, “Who Is the Lady in Black,” and a children’s book based on a Biblical story. A version of the children’s book was previously published in a magazine.

Clements, who studied creative writing at Brevard Community College in Florida, is available to speak to civic organizations and high school writing classes.

She has been a member of the Paper Chase Writers Club for four years and can be contacted at (870) 612-8155 or imhp.gotsky.com.