{"id":2247,"date":"2015-02-11T21:48:55","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T04:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lindacollison.com\/?p=2247"},"modified":"2015-02-12T08:15:57","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T15:15:57","slug":"brainstorming-smps-talk-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/brainstorming-smps-talk-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Tell Your Story; part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tell your Story\u00a0 (continued from yesterday’s post)<\/p>\n

\"scan0130\"Nursing made me a better writer because it gave me a subject other than myself to write about. A different perspective. It gave me both expertise and empathy. As did motherhood, for that matter. It wasn’t just about ME.<\/p>\n

But nursing and parenting \u2013 especially single parenting \u2013 is highly stressful. I needed a relaxing pastime to maintain my sanity. I took up skydiving.<\/p>\n

One snowy Sunday in May, 1981 I made my first jump at Sky\u2019s West, a drop zone at the Loveland -Ft. Collins Airport on Colorado’s Front Range.\u00a0 The challenge changed my life. Now you might wonder how jumping out of a perfectly good airplane could possibly be considered stress relief? Crouched in the open door of a Cessna, 10,500 feet above the ground, all your problems below shrivel to insignificance. Nothing else matters. I survived the first jump, was filled with euphoria, and had to do it again.\u00a0\u00a0 And again. And over 1100 more times. Learning to fly, that\u2019s another story of my life.<\/p>\n

\"scan0045\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sport of skydiving became my passion for well over a decade. I became a USPA certified jump master and instructor, I wrote articles for Skydiving and Parachutist magazines, and I met my future husband, Bob Russell, an experienced jumper. Together we managed a drop zone in Missouri one summer where we taught the Circus Flora to skydive, we competed on a 4-way team in Nationals one year, and we made jumps in Brazil and Namibia, Africa.\u00a0 Oh, the Bob-and-Linda adventures!\u00a0 One of these days I must write Travels with Bob…<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Actually Bob and I did write a book together:\u00a0 Rocky Mountain Wineries; a travel guide to the wayside vineyards<\/em><\/strong>, published in1994 by Pruett, a regional press in Boulder.\u00a0\u00a0 The research involved was exhausting.\u00a0 Imagine driving hundreds of miles on scenic roads in Bob\u2019s Corvette, finding wineries, talking with the vintners, hearing their stories, tasting their wine. Tasting more wine, right out of the barrel. Then having lunch and doing it all over again.\u00a0 I didn’t know it then, but this was classic business development.<\/p>\n

\"Rocky<\/p>\n

Pruett had a good publicist.\u00a0 Cassandra had Rocky Mountain Wineries<\/em><\/strong> in every bookstore in the Rocky Mountains States. She set up events: book signings and wine tastings.\u00a0 She sent the book out for advance reviews. \u00a0 She even sent Bob and I the ALA convention that year with the publisher Jim Pruettt. Our wine travel guide was a success, though we only made a small amount of money, once we factored in all the travel involved in the research.\u00a0 We followed it up with Colorado Kids; a statewide family outdoor adventure guide,<\/em><\/strong> which Pruett asked us to write (after turning down my proposal for a guidebook to the historic hotels of the Rockies.)\u00a0 Bob and I were qualified.\u00a0 We had both raised our children in Colorado \u2013 though we were married to different people at the time, and hadn\u2019t yet met.\u00a0 I might mention that in both cases we received a small advance against royalties from our publisher.\u00a0 Pruett was a dream publisher to work with.\u00a0 In 2012 Graphic Arts of Portland acquired Pruett, which had been publishing books in Boulder since 1954.<\/p>\n

\"51884EDM6GL__SL500_AA300_\"<\/p>\n

With two published guidebooks behind me \u2013 and dozens of short stories, articles and essays, I decided to try my luck with a novel. Now this wasn\u2019t my first novel. I had written practice novels. In my twenties, back at the kitchen table in Wyoming with a baby on the way and supper on the stove, I wrote a Western and entered it in a contest. It didn\u2019t win; it didn’t even place.\u00a0 But I learned something about writing a novel, which is, it\u2019s not as easy as it sounds.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the 1990\u2019s.\u00a0 Kids, grown. Writing a novel provisionally titled, With a Little Luck,<\/em><\/strong> about two teenaged boys in a garage band in West Virginia.\u00a0 This was a story of friendship and loss, of coming-of-age, of poverty and dysfunction, of talent and persistence.\u00a0 In 1997 I entered With a Little Luck<\/em><\/strong> in the Maui Writers Conference<\/strong> Writing Contest.\u00a0 In the nineties the Maui Writers Conference was a BIG DEAL.\u00a0 I’m talking New York editors and agents, Hollywood script writers and producers strolling around in Tommy Bahama Aloha shirts and designer sunglasses. Ron Howard was the keynote speaker. Anyway, to make a long story short, my story won the grand prize that year. Yes!\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Agents would be pounding at my door, my email inbox would be jammed full by morning. \u00a0 I just knew<\/em> Ron Howard was going to call me up for a lunch date to discuss movie rights. But the phone was strangely silent.\u00a0 And although Wendy Lipkind<\/a> did buy me a drink, she was more interested in representing my nursing stories, not my prize winning manuscript.<\/p>\n

Twelve months \u2013 and dozens of rejections later \u2013 I had to face the hard truth: With a Little Luck<\/em> had no luck at all. Why? Editors loved my writing, they loved the quirky characters but they didn\u2019t know how to sell the story — a criticism I heard over and over again. The story didn\u2019t fit into a marketable niche.\u00a0 (And who was Linda Collison, anyway?\u00a0 No one knew her.)<\/p>\n

Sadder and wiser, I shelved the orphaned story, vowing to write another novel — one that would be marketable. But how? I was discouraged. And I knew few people in the industry, except for the folks at Pruett Publishing and they didn’t publish novels — only regional nonfiction. While I waited for inspiration I continued to work on my craft, writing short stories and submitting them to magazines and literary publications.\u00a0 With some success.\u00a0 By now I knew how to write a crack query letter that would often result in a published essay or article.\u00a0 But writing a novel, that was my dream.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(To be continued…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tell your Story\u00a0 (continued from yesterday’s post) Nursing made me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[303,298,30,302,14,7],"class_list":["post-2247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-colorado-kids","tag-marketing","tag-maui-writers-conference","tag-rocky-mountain-wineries","tag-skydiving","tag-writing-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2247"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2265,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247\/revisions\/2265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}