In the small town where I live I have a favorite family restaurant, The Green Forest. It's a small, traditional family owned place where you can still get a hot beef sandwich or a homemade hamburger or soup that didn't come out of a can or box. Green Forest is the kind of place where they know your name and you feel more like a dinner guest than just a customer.
My family - husband and three kids strung from fifteen down to ten - go there often. If I'm too busy to make a meal, something that happens more and more often between rounds of edits, writing, and the seemingly endless cycle of promotion, the Green Forest is where we'll head to eat nine out of ten times.
Long before I made the leap from local writer to author, I penned - and still do - a weekly column in the local newspaper. Before that, I had a column in the larger paper in the bigger town to our north and even earlier I had a column in the countywide newspaper. All that really means is that a lot of people know my face because every column I've ever done always features a mug shot. Add to that the fact that I call myelf a shameless promotion whore and pass out business cards, book cover shots, and even refrigerator magnets everywhere I go, people know who I am.
Although I write a bit of everything from that column to the occasional essay in Chicken Soup For The Soul or other publications, my main focus these days is romance. Of my nine out and upcoming novels (ones sold with a contract to one of four publishers), all are romance but they range from erotic paranormal romance to sweet, clean historical and contemporary with everything in between.
One Saturday afternoon, after a local author fair, my husband took me and our youngest, my son, for a late lunch at Green Forest. As I dived into one of my favorites, the Grecian platter with three courses - homemade soup, a fantastic salad laden with feta cheese, black olives, and more, plus a gyros platter, our server asked me if I was the lady who "makes the books".
Because we live in an area with a growing Hispanic population, Norma, our server, has English as her second tongue. I told her that yes, I was, and as I shared a little about what I do for a living, we became friends. I sent my husband out to the car to bring her one of the anthologies with my work and told her where she might find the other books. My husband cautioned that some of what I write can be sexy and she smiled. Her daughter who reads wouldn't at all, she said, with a big grin.
I liked that phrase "makes the books" and so I saved it to memory. I can say I write, I can tell people that I am an author but when you get down to basics, I do make the books.
Since it is a small town in a conservative area, I get a few stares and the occcasional commentary from locals who have read or at least heard of my books. When I recently spent a day substitute teaching, something I once did on a regular basis but is now rare, the elementary school's librarian introduced me to the kids as "an author". On the same day, at a petting zoo brought over from the high school by some ag students, I overhead a high school student whisper that "she writes dirty books". I just smiled although I thought her remark was more than a little cheeky but I allowed for local perception. She isn't alone.
I don't find my books "dirty" but then I don't think sex is either. I think I write sensual love scenes between consenting adults that maintain the essence of love, that portray sex performed between those who love one another.
Now that I'm known as the lady who makes the books, I try to keep that in mind and not rush off to the supermarket in my well-worn, faded favorite "I Dream Of Jeannie" t-shirt and the jeans with the holes worn into the fabric. Whether I'm going to a department store or the local budget grocery, I take a moment to make sure I look presentable and if I get stares, so be it. At least I know I look nice!
Most folks I've found are fans and they like to see someone who makes books be just as down-home as they are themselves. A long-time friend told me not long ago that I have remained humble and she hopes I'll stay that way.
I plan to do that - just as I hope to continue being the lady that makes the books for the rest of my life!
My current releases can be found on my Amazon Central author page here:
http://www.amazon.com/Lee-Ann-Sontheimer-Murphy/e/B004JPBM6I/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
You'll also find my work at Evernight Publishing, Rebel Ink Press, Champagne Books, and Astraea Press as my releases go live as well as anywhere where romance works are found!
My family - husband and three kids strung from fifteen down to ten - go there often. If I'm too busy to make a meal, something that happens more and more often between rounds of edits, writing, and the seemingly endless cycle of promotion, the Green Forest is where we'll head to eat nine out of ten times.
Long before I made the leap from local writer to author, I penned - and still do - a weekly column in the local newspaper. Before that, I had a column in the larger paper in the bigger town to our north and even earlier I had a column in the countywide newspaper. All that really means is that a lot of people know my face because every column I've ever done always features a mug shot. Add to that the fact that I call myelf a shameless promotion whore and pass out business cards, book cover shots, and even refrigerator magnets everywhere I go, people know who I am.
Although I write a bit of everything from that column to the occasional essay in Chicken Soup For The Soul or other publications, my main focus these days is romance. Of my nine out and upcoming novels (ones sold with a contract to one of four publishers), all are romance but they range from erotic paranormal romance to sweet, clean historical and contemporary with everything in between.
One Saturday afternoon, after a local author fair, my husband took me and our youngest, my son, for a late lunch at Green Forest. As I dived into one of my favorites, the Grecian platter with three courses - homemade soup, a fantastic salad laden with feta cheese, black olives, and more, plus a gyros platter, our server asked me if I was the lady who "makes the books".
Because we live in an area with a growing Hispanic population, Norma, our server, has English as her second tongue. I told her that yes, I was, and as I shared a little about what I do for a living, we became friends. I sent my husband out to the car to bring her one of the anthologies with my work and told her where she might find the other books. My husband cautioned that some of what I write can be sexy and she smiled. Her daughter who reads wouldn't at all, she said, with a big grin.
I liked that phrase "makes the books" and so I saved it to memory. I can say I write, I can tell people that I am an author but when you get down to basics, I do make the books.
Since it is a small town in a conservative area, I get a few stares and the occcasional commentary from locals who have read or at least heard of my books. When I recently spent a day substitute teaching, something I once did on a regular basis but is now rare, the elementary school's librarian introduced me to the kids as "an author". On the same day, at a petting zoo brought over from the high school by some ag students, I overhead a high school student whisper that "she writes dirty books". I just smiled although I thought her remark was more than a little cheeky but I allowed for local perception. She isn't alone.
I don't find my books "dirty" but then I don't think sex is either. I think I write sensual love scenes between consenting adults that maintain the essence of love, that portray sex performed between those who love one another.
Now that I'm known as the lady who makes the books, I try to keep that in mind and not rush off to the supermarket in my well-worn, faded favorite "I Dream Of Jeannie" t-shirt and the jeans with the holes worn into the fabric. Whether I'm going to a department store or the local budget grocery, I take a moment to make sure I look presentable and if I get stares, so be it. At least I know I look nice!
Most folks I've found are fans and they like to see someone who makes books be just as down-home as they are themselves. A long-time friend told me not long ago that I have remained humble and she hopes I'll stay that way.
I plan to do that - just as I hope to continue being the lady that makes the books for the rest of my life!
My current releases can be found on my Amazon Central author page here:
http://www.amazon.com/Lee-Ann-Sontheimer-Murphy/e/B004JPBM6I/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
You'll also find my work at Evernight Publishing, Rebel Ink Press, Champagne Books, and Astraea Press as my releases go live as well as anywhere where romance works are found!
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4 comments:
How lovely, the lady who 'makes the books'. Thanks for sharing your story, and how word is getting about about the local romance writer :)
Lady who makes the books. That's cute!
I for one am happy you "make the books".....
Romance fiction is a genre I regarded for years as a curiodity. I would not read it because I saw it not as real literature but as a sort of Playboy for women, and its authors as scribblers of pornographic prose. (Write it, and they will come!) After actually reading a bit of romantic fiction though, and after some pondering, I now see the genre not as perversion but as having an essential function: It stimulates readers to feel love. Everyone loves love and everyone needs it, so any scandal in such "dirty books" might be in this: Many readers need romance fiction just to experience any love in their lives - if only vicariously. Their lives are the better it, and might be dismal without it.
Perhaps there can be no fame without detractors. Those who smirk and whisper gossip about you and your “dirty books” probably read romance fiction anyway, or want to, but when nobody is watching. That gossip is a quill in your cap. It recognizes you, your work and your vital genre. It is a part of your success.
You enrich your readers’ lives. That is a worthy claim to fame. Keep making your books!
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