My Mind Is An Open Mouth: A Life Behind the Mic - E-book - ePub

Biographie de Carolyn V. Hamilton

My first creative writing class was in my junior year in high school. I loved it so much (thank you, Miss Dearborn) that I repeated it in my senior year. Forty years passed before I wrote any more short stories, poetry, or fiction. In the meantime, I wrote just about every kind of advertising copy you can imagine: brochures, traditional print ads, speeches, radio & television commercials, direct mail letters, white papers and news releases.
From 1999 to 2001 I served in the U. S. Peace Corps in Suriname, South America. My assignment was "rural community development." To tell the truth, I had a lot of down time in the village, where I laid happily in my hammock and read a lot of novels. Finally it struck me: why not write one?Ever since I'd met the editor of Romantic Times on a cruise to Bermuda, I'd thought about writing a romance. After all, what could be easier? I thought.
I plunged into writing my eco-adventure romance, Hard Amazon Rain. Little did I know that romance is perhaps the toughest genre to write. Those romance readers have real strong ideas about what they want and what they don't want in their stories!In Suriname, I was intrigued by the story of Elisabeth Samson, the first black woman in the country in the 18th century to get legal permission from the Dutch to marry white.
I started out to tell her story in third person, but along the way this "voice" emerged. I have no idea where it came from. Elisabeth Samson, Forbidden Bride was published by a small press in 2004. It subsequently created a furor in Suriname, where I was publicly accused of "stealing (their) black culture".....and that's a whole different story for another time. By that time I was hooked on writing books.
I've learned a lot along the way, book/tape/seminar/conference junkie that I am. Where do I get my story ideas?I've been blessed in my life with jobs and adventures that have taken me to many countries in the world and led me to meet a lot of interesting people. I take two or three of them, put them in a bottle, shake it up, and ask myself, "What if?"I'm sure you've also found yourself on occasion in a situation where you thought, "You just can't make this stuff up!"For the record, I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington--hence the "webbed" feet-- and spent most of my adult life and career in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In Los Angeles...