Hosting my writer friend, Sheila Deeth today!
I met Sheila Deeth, author of Flower Child (Gypsy Shadow ePublishing, $3.99) in 2006 when she "won" me. Yes, I was a premium with my name in a bucket during Portland's Wordfest. Willamette Writers, of which I've been a member for many years -- a fine organization indeed -- had a stall as Sheila calls it at Wordfest and while she was new to the United States, a friend had given her two of my books so she put her raffle tickets into the bucket with my name on it, the only bucket author she recognized. Voila! She won me!
The arrangement then was that she was given my email (and I was told which budding author had won my hour of time) and we arranged to meet. Which we did. What a delight. I know, I was donating my time but I got so much more back hearing about her life, her love of reading, writing, running a local writer's group and meeting "her neighbors' dogs on the green."
Sheila had recently moved from the UK with her husband and sons and had finally decided to pursue a dream and say out loud that she wanted to write. She is soft spoken, shy, with lovely fly-away hair I could die for. Like many of us authors she has a tendency to diminish our dreams, worried someone will discover that we're frauds if we say we're "writers." Over tea, she bravely shared the first pages of a novel she was working on and I knew then she is definitely a writer. But I knew that from her emails that were breezy and funny and fascinating and I thoroughly expected her characters to be likewise and they are.
Gypsy Shadow is an epublisher and Sheila has three books with them, the latest being Flower Child. Here's the blurb (as we say) for the book: When Megan miscarries her first pregnancy it feels like the end of everything; instead it's the start of a curious relationship between the grieving mother and an unborn child who hovers somewhere between ghost and angel. Angela, Megan's "little angel," has character and dreams all her own, friends who may or may not be real angels, and a little brother who brings hope to her mother's world. But Angela's dream-world has a secret and one day Angela might learn how to be real. Doesn't that sound inventive?Sheila writes fantasy and Sci Fi and she describes herself as a "mongrel Christian mathematician". I'm not sure what that is but meeting her and enjoying her company has changed my mind about what a mathematician is. I mean, I could actually talk with her! Sheila holds a Bachelor and Masters degree in mathematics from Cambridge University, England. (I'm now volunteering at a middle school in the English Language Learner program and my greatest anxiety is when we do math together. Fortunately my charge, a fifth-grader is a gem and she gets the new math. I'm just grateful for my IPhone calculator). Anyway, the first complete work I read of Sheila's is a self-published little Christmas devotional she gave me--Christmas! Genesis to Revelation in 100 words a Day combines that Christian viewpoint with the precision and beauty of math. The entire Christmas story in 100 words a day. It's a thin little book and a delight.
Sheila gave me that Christmas book when she "won" me a second time, that time at a Willamette Writer's conference where she once again took her chances and put her 6 tickets into the bucket with my name. When we met, she brought a writer friend along and three of us talked about silencing those harpies which are the greatest deterrent to getting published or even sitting down to write that creative people face. Read Sheila's version of our meetings where you can see for yourself how well she writes.
Sheila's short stories, book reviews and articles can be found in VoiceCatcher 4, Murder on the Wind, Poetic Monthly, Nights and Weekends, the Shine Journal and Joyful Online. Besides her Gypsy Shadow ebooks, Sheila has several self-published works available from Amazon and Lulu, and a full-length novel under contract to come out next year.
Now here she is with her third published novel. Flower Child promises to be an inventive story of loss, love and renewal. It's only 15,500 words so you can read it in a few hours. It's inexpensive $3.99 as a download. And ebooks are becoming more and more the face of the publishing future. So I'm hosting Sheila Deeth on her blog tour to celebrate how well she silenced those voices that told her she couldn't write and how proud I am of her that she came to believe that she is indeed a writer. Now the rest of us can discover that, too.
You can also visit Sheila's Blog
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