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Award Winning Author - Linda Jacobs

Linda’s contact details:

• http://www.readlindajacobs.com/index.html

About the Author

Born a university brat and trained at the Master's level in Geology, I was one of Exxon Corporation's first woman field geologists. Before my 2004 move to New Mexico, I lived in Houston and Dallas and worked for a number of oil and gas companies on the front line where new fields are found. This fascinating and stimulating career was a roller coaster, with discoveries and dry holes, but I wouldn't change a minute of it.

Growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, fiction came to me when I was very young. Already an avid reader, I'd hit a ball against a wall and tell myself stories . . . about people who lived in New York City, a place I�€™d only read about in Dorothy B. Hughes's and Jacqueline Susanns work. By age thirteen, I'd taught myself to hunt and peck on Dad's old Royal Typewriter and started writing novels. In addition to New York, my characters roamed Hollywood, Yosemite and Hawaii. I even featured a Saudi Arabian princess attending college in America (after careful research of Medina and Mecca in the 1963 World Book Encyclopedia). My largest effort was over one hundred single-spaced, typewritten pages. Eventually, I decided, as many adolescents do, that my mother might be reading my material, so I had a bonfire in the backyard. This is certainly a blessing for posterity, as well as for me. Now, no one will ever know how truly awful those works must have been.

I published poetry and a short story in the Greenville High School literary magazine, known as Bits-Lit. In college at Furman University and doing graduate work at The Ohio State University, I studied science and my fiction took a back burner to technical writing. I did read, though, voraciously: James Mitchener, Ian Fleming, Ken Follett, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, and Nora Roberts to sample a few.

After a twenty-year layoff, in 1992, I joined Rice University's novel writing program, chaired by American Book Award winner Venkatesh Kulkarni. I studied with this consummate teacher and author for a total of six years, until he passed on. The Rice critique group has remained together to this day and I thank the following people for their steadfast support of my efforts: Marjorie Arsht, Kathryn Brown, Judith Finkel, Bob Hargrove, Elizabeth Hueben, Karen Meinardus, the late Joan Romans, Angela Shepherd, Jeff Theall, Diana Wade, and Madeleine Westbrook.

Then, following the old adage that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, I met Rita Gallagher. Renowned author of novels and non-fiction works on writing, Rita has taught over two hundred published authors. She focuses on novel structure and helped me go from writing great scenes to putting a book together. Though Rita turned eighty while I was her pupil, her mind was still sharp enough to find a sentence on page seventy that belonged on page seventeen. Unfortunately, she passed away in early 2004, and the world lost a grand lady.

Married to fellow geoscientist Richard Jacobs, I divide my time between the West and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where I inherited the farm. I enjoy adventure travel, having scuba dived the Caribbean, taken two African safaris, and gone alpine hiking in New Zealand and the Spanish Pyrenees. And of course, I regularly visit Yellowstone.

March, 2013
Camel Press

2010, Books in Motion

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