Kudos to our BWW colleagues!

Kudos to our BWW colleagues

Here’s a brief shout out to two of our Book Writing World members! Congratulations on your recent successes. 🙂

As a public librarian, Leslie Rodd spent more than thirty years promoting books as well as reading to the blind, jail inmates and adult literacy students. On weekends, she worked on the fiction writing she’d wanted to do since childhood. With retirement came more time, and more stories, like Fiery Night, a chapter from the First Blind Man on the Moon, Rodd’s novel-in-progress.

Fiery Night originated with her (late) first husband, and is based on one of many anecdotes he’d told Rodd’s about his colorful life as a blind man and jazz musician. Of course, what to him was a three-sentence anecdote, to her was a fourteen-page story.

The short story was a finalist for the Bosque Fiction Prize and published in Bosque (the magazine) by the Albuquerque Writers Coop in 2011. Since getting published is such a wonderful event, Rodd went to the magazine launch in Albuquerque, rubbed elbows with fellow writers (many of who were gray-haired), and signed copies of the magazine.

Leslie Rodd is a member of the Book Writing World and earned an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University.

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“The book I co-authored with Art Bachrach and Nita Murphy took five years to research, collaborate, and write,” said Judith Nasse, “And last week Nita and I signed a contract with a press to publish the biography,  Millicent Rogers: A Life in Full.”

Sadly Art passed away in December. Nasse and Murphy are pushing ahead to get this dream book of his out in time for the 2012 Taos summer theme of “Remarkable Women in Taos.”

“It’s strange in that we still have our ups and downs about it: elation that it is being published, lows that some of the photos aren’t the right dpi for the book designer for instance,” Nasse said. “I’m learning that each stage of a book has it’s own little, or giant, journey.”

The hardest part of all for Murphy and Nasse is that their friend will not be present for the book-signing and launch party.

“That was one of his favorite parts of writing a book,” Nasse said. “He loved organizing and attending the book signings in his own book store, Moby Dickens in Taos.”

 

Judith Nasse is a founding member of the Book Writing World, a historical novelist, artist, and currently living in Taos, New Mexico.