How to Win an Author : An Amazing Tale by Sheila Deeth

This month as everyone heads back to school, the leaves start changing colour and the air brings a chill I am bringing you lots of reading material in hopes you’ll find something you love to read. While I am putting forth a huge effort to bring awareness to my own books I understand that everyone wants something different to read. Please show a huge welcome to all my guests by commenting and checking out their books.

Sheila Deeth grew up in the UK and has a Bachelors and Masters in mathematics from Cambridge University, England. Now living in the States near Portland, Oregon, she enjoys reading, writing, drawing, telling stories and meeting her neighbors’ dogs on the green.There’s something somewhere for everyone to read – you just need to know where to find it.

How I won an author at a fair

One day my husband and I both lost our jobs—I guess that was the inevitable downside of working for the same company. We both devoted ourselves to updating skills, researching markets, and sending out endless applications. It was boring, depressing, and thoroughly demoralizing. Sure, I learned how to write Java buttons and boxes, but there’s more to life than that—and more to getting a job. Meanwhile we cheered ourselves up by taking walks around the neighborhood, reorganizing furniture, watching TV and mowing the lawn. I told bright happy stories to children in Sunday school then came home and cried. And then…

Well, then I realized I actually had time to write those stories down, instead of just telling them. So I wrote, submitted, hoped and dreamed, and moved house—that latter following my husband who found a job in a different State. But, as many of you who are writers will know, writing, submitting, hoping and dreaming, while never boring, can soon become as depressing and demoralizing as trying to get a job.

It’s not easy to submit

My depression was just setting in when Portland put on an amazing FREE book event called Wordstock. My husband, wise generous man that he is, took me downtown and insisted I go in and enjoy myself. So I wandered aisles of books, authors, agents and publishers, eventually wending my way to a booth offering a really strange raffle—“Win an hour of an author’s time.” For five dollars, still less than I’d expected to pay in entrance fees, I bought five tickets and put them all in the box for the only local author I’d ever even heard of—a historical fiction writer, called Jane Kirkpatrick. Then I wandered the aisles some more, listened to talks, and went home.

A few weeks later I learned I’d won an hour of Jane Kirkpatrick’s time. But she gave me so much more. First she emailed me, asking me to write about myself. Then she emailed with direct and specific encouragement about the way I wrote. Then we met at a hotel where she and her husband (and dog) were staying. Over cups of tea, she read the first page of my work-in-progress, made specific comments again on my first paragraph, filled me with encouragement, told me her own writing journey, insisted I should never give up, and gave me two more of her books—all of which I love!

Always Keep Trying

A few years later I met Jane Kirkpatrick again and she remembered me. Sometimes she speaks at events I attend. Sometimes I go to events to see her. We see each other maybe once every couple of years, and every time she remembers me. Every time she reminds me not to give up. Every time she tells me I can make it.

But will I? I don’t know. I know I’ll keep trying though, and I know I’ll always be grateful that just when depression was threatening to make me give up, I won an author at a fair.

My latest book, Bethlehem’s Baby, is #6 in my Five-Minute Bible StoryTM Series, published by Cape Arago Press.

Blurb:

Meet the Emperor Augustus’s advisors, the quiet research student helping wise men study stars, the shepherd whose granddad keeps complaining, an Egyptian fisherboy, a Roman soldier, and more in this set of 40 5-minute read-aloud stories based around the events of the Christ Child’s birth in Bethlehem.

Links:

Find Bethlehem’s Baby at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EY172MA/

More of the Bethlehem’s Baby (The Five-Minute Bible Story Series 6)TM Series on the publisher’s website: http://capearagopress.com/Five-Minute.html

Connect with Sheila at:

Sheila Deeth
Blog
Facebook
Fan page
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Goodreads

Oh, and Wordstock’s no longer free, but it still costs about the same as those raffle tickets. It’s taking place on October 3-6 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

Amazon.com Widgets

Thanks for joining us, Sheila. I for one believe you have already succeeded – congratulations!
And thank you for reading,