Welcome Azalea Festival Street Fair Shoppers!

With the current pandemic and subsequent state of affairs, I am so happy that you have made it onto my website and apparently to my blog! As we have all had to give up our hopes and plans due to COVID-19, I am tremendously disappointed to miss this opportunity to visit Wilmington again and to share the stories of Lumina with so many who remember her. Those who are unacquainted with our premier beach pavilion that reigned on the southern tip of Wrightsville Beach from 1905 to her destruction in 1973 might get a small taste of what might have been in the summer of 1928. That was the year that the Shag was created by Lewis Philip Hall and introduced on the Lumina dance floor in August during the feast of Pirates. The Roaring Twenties was a time of extravagance and change, National Prohibition, the flappers and the changing roles of women, the invisible black population that built Wrightsville Beach, and the social mores of the times.

LUMINA transports the reader to the summer of 1928 to Wrightsville Beach where tourists, middle-class folks, and aristocrats alike are dancing the night away at the beachfront pavilion where they are falling in love—not only with each other but with the grand ballroom itself. Told in alternating sequences between modern-day friends and the newly discovered diary entries and old letters from young siblings on the brink of decadent change, Lumina becomes magic for anyone on the dance floor from eight until midnight. Kip and Sylvie are swept away until they realize that people are not always what they seem.

If you would like to order a copy of LUMINA, please return to the website and click on Buy the Book. I will be happy to send you an autographed copy. Thanks for visiting. 

I hope you find the magic!

Charlotte Readers Podcast February 25, 2020

Take a listen to Mary Flinn and Mary Ann Claud as they talk with Landis Wade of Charlotte Readers Podcast. LUMINA and Alex Dances are both books set in North Carolina and both have themes about dancing.

S5-08 Mary Ann Claud and Mary Flinn – “Alex Dances” and “Lumina”

https://content.blubrry.com/charlottereaderspodcast/Claud_and_Flinn_episode.mp3

The Lady on the Plane

After a full decade now of writing as a self-published author with nine novels to my credit, I am still undaunted in my quest to have my work read, whether as a best-selling author as I’d once hoped, or one who merely has a regional following. My old, red-hot dreams of supporting myself through my writing have faded to glowing embers, but I always find so much gratification in connecting personally with readers. Something larger than both the reader and the writer emerges as we come to know each other through the written word. We recognize a shared passion on the pages. For me, I can liken the experience to a runner’s high, or that sense of euphoria a musician or an actor experiences at the height of a performance. It is sensational. My readers tell me they love my work, which encourages me to keep writing and that exclamation, “I can’t wait for your next book!” inspires me to continue. I knew going into the writing vocation that authors I admire like J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, Twilight series author Stephanie Myer, Catherine Stockett (The Help), and Jan Karon, author of the Mitford series, all had trouble finding an agent, so I knew to expect disappointment. Some of those authors claim it took over 60 tries to get noticed. I wasn’t particularly devastated when my own efforts didn’t result in an agent contract. Although I would like to sell more books, self-publishing hasn’t been a bad gig. If self-publishing was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, then I knew I should follow suit. But in the back of my mind I always think: I am only one person away from busting this thing wide open!

Last summer, on a Denver-bound plane to visit my daughter, the lady sitting next to me eventually asked what I was doing in my retirement. I told her I was an author, we talked about my books and my publishing journey. Also retired, this lady had been a high-powered executive in a marketing firm. As an avid reader, she seemed impressed with my determination and the gumption it must have taken me to learn how to go about self-publishing, but she wondered why I hadn’t hired an agent. I explained that I hadn’t found one and that each time I wrote a book, I researched prospective agents for my particular work and then sent out about 25 queries. Her reply was simple: “You didn’t send out enough. In business you have to follow a law-of-averages model to be successful. You have to send at least 100 queries. Of those, you’ll get about ten serious replies. Three or four will then drop out, three more will say they’re not interested and of the two remaining, one of them will take you on.” She then chuckled and said, “I really want to be your agent!” (Although I’d kind of wished she were serious, that never happened.)

The end of the story is—as always—to be continued. I believe a sequel is always possible in anything in life. With my next manuscript I’ll probably send out 100 queries to see where it leads. In the meantime, I still enjoy what I do, my positive reader feedback, and meeting nice people on airplanes who appreciate my craft. I have yet to sell enough books to be self-sufficient but fame and fortune were never my goals in the first place. An aura exists around the creation of something that comes from within and for me, that process is the prize.