My guest today is author, Smoky Zeidel. She's a free-spirited writer she hails from the San Gabriel Mountain area in California. She's worn many hats in her life, wife, mother, teacher, book reviewer for several newspapers and magazines, author, and survivor.
Smoky shares a bit with us about her writing journey and how an intriguing box of letters dating from the 1920's inspired her book, On the Choptank Shores.
I've wanted to be a writer ever since the fourth grade, when
I first picked up the book, Harriet the
Spy. I adored Harriet. I emulated her, carrying around a notebook and
making notes on everything I saw going on around me. I think—no, I know—I
annoyed my friends terribly doing this, so after a few weeks, I quit doing
this.
But I didn’t quit writing. I acquired my first diary
Christmas of that same year, and have kept diaries and journals ever since.
That’s now almost forty-five years of writing something almost every day!
Life got in the way of my trying to write professionally
until the day my life changed dramatically: July 11, 1989. At 10:17 that
morning, I took a direct hit from a bolt of lightning. I nearly died. I guess
technically I did die; I had no heartbeat when the paramedics arrived on the
scene.
But, I lived, albeit with a rather broken body. I had heart
damage, nerve damage, damage to the cartilage in my knees. My right ear drum
vaporized. My jaw was smashed. Flash burns covered my body. Not a pretty
picture.
My body was broken, yes. But my mind was as healthy and
curious as ever! A few years after the lightning, I was at home, recovering
from one of my now more than a dozen surgeries (I’ve lost count). I saw an ad
in my local hometown newspaper advertising for freelance feature writers. I
wrote the editor a letter, arguing that while my degree was in psychology, not
journalism, anyone who took seventeen years to complete their BA degree because
they tried to major in everything except physics obviously could write a good
paper, and therefore would make a good feature writer. I got hired immediately.
My feature writing career flourished, because I could work
when I felt well and turn down assignments when one of my health issues flared
up. But deep inside, I wasn’t content. I wanted to write fiction, to follow the
dream I’d had since childhood.
Then one day my parents came to visit. My mother brought me
a box of love letters written between my favorite aunt and uncle during their
courting days, back in the 1920s. They told a fabulous story of love, of
struggling through hard times, of separation, of reunion. I somehow knew these
letters were meant to be a book.
My first novel was borne of those letters, albeit not in the
way I intended. They inspired me to sit at my word processor (this was long
before I had a PC!) and imagine what life would be like, struggling to farm
land with poor soil, to work with your hands, not machines, to truly survive, not simply exist. My first novel, Redeeming
Grace, was borne of that imagining.
Unfortunately, my first publisher went under several months
after my book was published. But that really didn’t matter. I quickly found a
new publisher, and I’ve been writing books for them ever since.
I still have health issues, twenty-two years after the
lightning. I had my third knee replacement only eight months ago (and yes, I
have only two knees!); just last week I keeled over in a dead faint at my desk
and was hospitalized because of some neurological glitch in my brain. I have
chronic pain issues that make it impossible for me to write on some days;
impossible for me to even get off the couch.
Yet, I persevere. I have a wonderfully supportive husband,
Scott, who himself is an artist, a classical guitarist. He nurtures me when I’m
sick and down, but as I heal, he has just the right way of nudging me back into
my office to write. And my publisher, Kimberlee Williams of Vanilla Heart
Publishing, has been more than fabulous. In fact, she just gave that first book
of mine new life—it has just been re-released with a more appropriate title and
a beautiful new cover, as On the Choptank
Shores: A Love Story. And, to my delight, it is finally reaching readers,
who have raved about it, I am happy to say.
I don’t recommend you stand out in a storm and get struck by
lightning in order to get motivated to write! But sometimes life hands you a
raw deal. You’re going to live through it whether you lie on the couch and moan
and grown, and you’re going to live through it if you get up, greet each day
with a smile, write your books, and live your life.
Which life would you
choose? I, for one, choose the latter!
ON CHOPTANK SHORES: A Love Story. Available now.
On the Choptank Shores is set on Maryland's eastern shore in the late 1920's. Happy endings, in novels as in life, sometimes come at a heavy price.
The tragic deaths of her mother and two younger siblings have left Grace Harmon responsible for raising her sister Miriam and protecting her from their abusive father, Luther, a zealot preacher with a penchant for speaking in Biblical verse who is on a downward spiral toward insanity.
Otto Singer charms Grace with his gentle courtship and devotion to his brother, Henry, but is unable to share with Grace the terrible secret he has kept more than twenty years.
Luther's insane ravings and increasingly violent behavior force Grace to question everything she ever knew. Then, tragedy strikes just when Otto's secret is uncovered, unleashing demons that threaten to destroy the entire family. Can Grace find the strength to save them all? Excerpt
Smoky
Trudeau Zeidel is the author of two novels, On the Choptank Shores (formerly titled Redeeming Grace) and The Cabin, and two nonfiction
books on writing. She is also the author of Observations of an Earth Mage, an enchanting
collection of prose, poetry, and photographs celebrating the beauty and
splendor of the natural world. All her books are published by Vanilla Heart
Publishing.
In a Flash, where she recounts the story of how she was
struck by lightning and how the experience has affected her life in the more
than two decades following the event.
A
popular book reviewer, Smoky wrote reviews for several newspapers and magazines
before starting her blog, Smoky Talks Books. She specializes in reviewing books
published by small and independent presses and by emerging writers.
Known
to her fans as The Earth Mage, Smoky lives her life honoring Mother Earth
through her writing, visual art, and spiritual practice. She lives in
California with her husband Scott (a college music professor and classical
guitarist), her daughter (a college student and actress), and a menagerie of
animals, both domestic and wild, in a ramshackle cottage in the woods
overlooking the San Gabriel Valley and Mountains beyond. When she isn’t
writing, she spends her time hiking in the mountains and deserts, splashing in
tidepools, and resisting the urge to speak in haiku.
