About ten years ago
I returned to college to study acting and took two courses in playwriting. I wrote the screenplay “The Kitchen Dance”
and after several submissions and several rejections I tucked the story away in
my computer files and went on to write other screenplays, plays, worked on
another couple of novels and made notes for other novel ideas.
As I mentioned in my about me, I am an Actress both stage and
screen. I performed in university productions, community theaters, skits and
programs for my church’s televised sermon. I worked as background on film productions
filmed in north Louisiana and a few roles, including principal roles, in
independent films. In the course of pursuing my acting studies and in
performing, I learned a great deal about character development and dialogue
driven story lines.
I feel this experience has helped me to create solid
characters with interesting lives that have great stories to tell. Two of my one-act
plays, A Friend or Something and Transforming Christmas selected to be
performed in separate play competitions and I wrote two skits, The Toilet Seat and Two Incomes, which were performed in televised sermons.
Recently, I revisited The
Kitchen Dance and realized my screenplay was merely a synopsis of the
story. I set out to create a manuscript
for a short story or novella but ended up with a 86,000 word novel. I bypassed agents and sought independent
publishers accepting queries from unpublished writers. I submitted queries to about three-dozen
small publishers, sent about a dozen full manuscripts requests, and was offered
contracts from four publishers. I am
pleased to announce Mélange Books, LLC at melange-books.com, will publish my
debut novel, The Kitchen Dance. The expected
release date is January 2013.
One interesting thing about me is a game I play with my best
friend of nearly twenty years. She tells
me about an unsolved crime she read in the paper or on the Internet and I can
immediately come up with a fictional story of what really happened. Another clever
thing about me is that I am one of those annoying people who almost always know
not only how the movie is going to end but what the next line out the
characters mouth will be.