As you know, I love to share information about other authors! I love to learn about how and why they write, and share information about their projects.
Today, I am thrilled to introduce a fellow Morgan James Publishing author, J.L. Callison. Make sure to read all the way to the end, J.L. is offering a gift to my readers!
J.L. wrote:
Thanks, Kris, for the opportunity to share with your audience.
Just a bit about me, for what it’s worth. I’m a long-time reader, learning to read before attending kindergarten way back in the days when it was all black and white. My third grade teacher challenged me to read, and I read over three hundred books that school year, including volumes A-H of the World Book Encyclopedia, ending the year reading on an eighth grade level. I made up a lot of stories but never seriously wrote anything, thinking I would do that when I grew up.
When in college, my EN102 tutorial teacher flunked me, and she told me to never try to write, that I couldn’t do it. She was a super-plotter, and I was very much (and still am) a pantser. For over forty years, I didn’t try to write, but I still read voraciously. It was not until I read about Louis L’Amour, that he did not think of himself as a writer but rather in the vein of the old-time oral storytellers, that I decided I could do that, too.
I wrote a few little things, but then remembering what my teacher had said, I threw them away without anyone ever seeing them. I didn’t believe the stories could be any good.
In January of 2013, I contracted the Guillain-Barre Syndrome and became disabled, unable to walk without use of a walker, and for only short distances then. I had been accustomed to working 60-80 hours a week and really didn’t have time to write, but now I had nothing but time on my hands. Bored out of my mind, I started writing a story that I had been mulling over since the mid-80s, a story of two teens who were kidnapped and flown to remote upper Maine. Their kidnapper left them at an empty hunting lodge but hit a goose on takeoff and crashed, leaving them Stranded at Romson’s Lodge.
Having no idea what to do with the story, I wrangled a scholarship to attend a writers conference where I met and interviewed an acquisitions editor. (I didn’t even know one was.) We talked about the publishing process, and when the next interviewee didn’t show up, the editor asked if I had written anything. I told him about my story, and he asked for the manuscript.
Why am I telling all of this? Is it because I think I’m a great writer who just happened to get found? Hardly!
My purpose is this: Don’t ever let someone else destroy your dream, telling you you can’t do something. I don’t remember who it was that said it, but a quote (paraphrased) that has stuck in my mind now for years goes something like this: “Don’t go to your grave with your song still inside of you.”
Each of us has a gift within us. Don’t go to your grave with it still inside of you. Don’t allow someone else to steal your dream or instill the fear in you that you can’t do something. Live your dream!
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My most recent release is an anti-bullying love story called Rotund Roland. It’s the saga of a boy born with gigantism who is bullied for his size until one teacher and one girl stand up for him when he is in high school, and his musical talent is revealed. It has great reviews from educators and mental health experts as well as from those who have experienced being bullied at some point in their lives. One mental health expert in Canada is using it in a campaign to “Eradicate Bullying Through Love.”
My current project, hopefully being released this summer, is a Christian Romance about a grieving widower who has lost his childhood sweetheart and wife of twenty-seven years. A man-hating woman who was sexually abused as a girl is thrust into his life. His household is overwhelmed when his daughter’s soccer coach comes to them for temporary shelter after she is badly beaten by her husband. When a tornado destroys their university dormitory, the soccer team also takes refuge there. Life as he knew it was over!
Watch for Kateryna: A Love Story.
My books are available wherever books are purchased online and through my website: www.jlcallison.com Any books ordered through my site are signed and personalized. Email me with any special personalizations you would like.
For Kris’s readers, I have a special gift. I will give you, free of charge, an ebook of my novelette, My Donkey and the Master: A Story of Sanctified Imagination, if you email me and tell me you saw this on Kris’s blog. (Sorry, but it doesn’t work on Kindle.)
Contact me through the website or my email: authorjlcallison@gmail.com I love to hear from readers. Feel free to shoot me any comments or questions.
