Hello everyone.
My name is Carolyn Niethammer and I am very excited about the release
this month of my first novel (and tenth book) The Piano Player.
Although I’ve been marketing my books for nearly forty years,
having a novel is a new and exciting experience. The piano player in
the title is Mary Rose, a well-born young woman who comes to
Tombstone in 1882 and goes to work as an entertainer at the Bird Cage
Theatre. She finds that nothing she previously learned about proper
womanhood pertains anymore, and she must toughen up and transform
herself into Frisco Rosie if she wants to survive.
The novel isn’t a huge departure from
my previous writing, other than being largely made up. All my earlier
books are set in the West. Five of them involve food, mostly recipes
for edible wild plants. And food continues to be addressed in this
book. One of the main characters in The Piano Player is Nellie
Cashman, based on the real Nellie, a famous cook and boarding house
owner. After Tombstone collapsed as the silver mines filled with
water, she travelled from boomtown to boomtown, always elevating the
level of food service wherever she settled. When gold was discovered
in the Yukon in 1897, she hiked in over the ice to try to stake a
claim even though she was nearly 50 years old. In the novel, Rosie
goes with her, hoping to find a claim with a payoff big enough to let
her establish her own saloon business. But since it is a novel,
things don’t go as planned, and both women have to reinvent how
they are going to survive in far north Dawson City.
Some people are natural fiction
writers; I had to study. In fact, as a journalism major I had to
unlearn much of my schooling to become a good novelist. Among the
many books I studied, my most important guide was the classic
Structuring Your Novel: From Basic Idea to Finished Manuscript
by Robert C. Meredith and John D. Fitzgerald. My copy is so well used
the pages are falling out. How to Write and Sell Your First Novel
by Oscar Collier and Frances Spatz Leighton was also good. The most
fun was a class I took on-line in writing sex scenes. Turns out there
is an orderly progression to seduction to get the reader ready along
with the heroine. There are no explicit sex scenes in The Piano
Player, but we know what is going on and are left to imagine the
rest.
The fiction writing experience has been
so much fun that I’m 30,000 words into my next still-untitled
novel. I’ve had to stop writing for a bit to get The Piano
Player off the ground and I’ve left the heroine in the new book
in a very unsettling situation. She’ll just have to wait for me to
get back to her.
You can visit Carolyn at
www.cniethammer.com. She
shares a blog about Southwestern food with three other women at
http://savorthesouthwest.wordpress.com.
The Piano Player is available at Oak Tree Press and Amazon.
Her other books can be found at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or
ordered from your local independent book seller.
Thanks for sharing your publication story, Carolyn! Even "natural born" fiction writers have a lot to learn! We look forward to more novels from you!
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