I am pleased to introduce you to Mary Rosenblum: Writer, mother, dog trainer, writing teacher, web master AND one of the strongest women I've met.

Mary's writing career began, as she says on her site, in 1988 when she sent a story to Stan Schmidt at Analog. He took the time to write her a note telling her that her ending was "AWFUL" but it paved the way for her to get into Clarion West and the rest...as it goes...is history!

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mary (and she's interviewed me too!). What I admire most about Mary is she was a single Mom and raised her boys, on her own, with her writing. She said that her writing was "their" thing, not "her" thing. She's a true inspiration to women, especially women writers (and mothers), because she's shown how hard work and determination can help set the path to reaching your dreams.

Mary is a strong supporter of women writers. I know, she gave me a chance to shine when I had little background. Because of her faith in my writing and belief I could go far, I gained the confidence to get more of my work out there. Now there's no stopping me!

Thank you Mary. From the bottom of my heart.

INTERVIEW WITH MARY ROSENBLUM

The following is an interview I conducted in the fall of 2007. It was featured in WOW-womenonwriting's Premium Green newsletter. Enjoy!

I cannot tell you how exciting it was for me to be on the interviewer’s side of the table with Mary Rosenblum. After Mary interviewed me at Long Ridge, she’d mentioned being a single Mom who raised her children with her writing. From that day, I wanted to help tell Mary’s story as a source of inspiration for other Writing Mamas out there who waffle about whether they can “make it.”

My main goal was to share with people things about Mary no one may know beyond a tutor/student role. I’d always noticed how supportive she was of women writers—especially young mothers trying to make a living out of their writing. Mary sparked in me a tremendous confidence after our interview and I’ve accomplished so much since then because she believed in me.

Hopefully the following chat will help show other Writing Mamas that it’s possible to achieve all their writing dreams if they start by believing in themselves.

CHYNNA: Mary, thank you so much for agreeing to chat with me. My favorite quote from you is, “Boredom and a regular day job are two things that seemed highly unappealing, even when I was a kid.” Let’s start with when you got the writing bug. Have you always been interested in writing? When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

MARY: I was always a story maker. Any time I was bored and had no book nearby (or was sitting at a school desk) I made up stories to entertain myself. Sometimes they derived from stories I’d read, sometimes they were new, but stories were my way to Never Be Bored. But think of myself as a writer?   No way!  Writers were born, after all. They sprang full blown from the womb with a scarlet “W” on their foreheads and if you didn’t have that, you shouldn’t even think about it.  Such was the response to any “I want to be a writer” foolishness. 

CHYNNA: It’s funny but I’d always had the same thoughts about the scarlet “W” [Laughs] Tell us what drew you to SF.

MARY: I fell into SF when I was 12 and we vacationed for the first of several summers with my double cousins at Nag’s Head, NC in a shared house.  We kids had to endure a forced two-hour “rest time” every afternoon (the adults were the ones who needed it!) and I quickly ran through the books I’d brought from home. But under my bed was a box of Galaxy magazines. I was instantly hooked! My imagination always worked over time and suddenly I could contemplate museums on Mars (I remember that story vividly), crises in space, the life and death of vacuum outside a bare skin of hull, and the vastness of a universe that I could by golly see by going outside at midnight and looking up!

What a way to step outside the things we have so taken for granted every day that we no longer really see and look at them with clear eyes.  What a way to look at who we are and ask, “Where are we going?  What are we doing?” in a way that makes people think. I fell in love with that genre and have never fallen out of love.

Yes, it is full of trashy stuff, but the good SF is, in my opinion, the most flexible and powerful genre of them all.  You can make people think about big things without realizing it.  (And I know it works because some readers have chided me for keeping them awake at night…thinking. Hehehe.)

CHYNNA: [Laughs] I’ve read some of your books and can understand the “staying awake” statement. The most inspirational thing I absorbed from you is how you supported your young sons with your writing. How did you do it? How did you keep your head up even with rejections/competition/figuring out where your writing “fit in”? What kept you motivated to keep going and not get that regular day job?

MARY: Oh, wow.  That was a long, tough time.  I survived because of two things. One: I was willing to not live according to the standards of the day – that is, buy all the stuff, do all the stuff that the ‘successful’ person does.  Two:  I was willing to work my butt into the ground to live the way I wanted. 

I did both.  We lived on less than 20,000 a year. Well less, some years. I grew all our food on our 2.5 acres and heated the house with our woodstove. I cleaned up neighbors’ downed trees after storms (firewood), I picked up apples in peoples yards when they didn’t want ‘em (fed the goats that gave us milk and meat), I cut, raked, and stacked hay by hand, with a scythe no less, to feed those goats in the winter.  I cut, split, hauled our firewood.  Any way I could avoid paying out cash by putting in sweat, I did.  As my kids got older they helped.

Neither of them is in credit card debt, they know the reality of working hard when you have to.  For fun, we did things that don’t cost any money.  We didn’t eat in restaurants. I brought dinner made at home to the games when my kids were doing things like wrestling, baseball, search and rescue. Ten pounds of flour can make a lot of treats for your kids with some yeast and sugar and home raised fruits.

You have to decide what’s important to you and you have to balance that against how you want to live.  If you want to live a $90,000 a year lifestyle you have to earn that $90.000. I really really wanted to be doing what I was doing and I was willing to work very hard to do that.  Actually, we qualified for welfare most years. I never took it.  We ate better than most people and I had enough money for our needs. My kids didn’t have designer jeans and fancy toys, but they don’t desire them as adults. Welfare would have been a “loser” brand. We were not losers.

CHYNNA: Wow, Mary. There are definitely some great tips to make note of there. How did you balance writing and being a mom? Do you have any tips/suggestions to moms who struggle to find writing time with all the Mom Duties they have?

MARY: I prioritized. My kids came first. Always. Livestock came next. They couldn’t feed and water themselves. But if a story was really working and the house needed to be vacuumed, I did the story first. So, sometimes things were messy and sometimes everything was clean.  I did trades.

“Let me finish this chapter, be quiet, and we’ll go to the park and play.”

The writing wasn’t my thing--something to shut myself away from my kids. I did it in the main room, they would be watching TV right there, and I could join in from time to time. Writing was our thing. They could look over my shoulder and read any time they wanted to. 

CHYNNA: Mary, I love how you called it “our thing”. That’s exactly how I see it. I've written articles on how writers should find their own space but I too write with my kids around me (sometimes its just unavoidable.) Do you have any tips on how other writing Moms (who can't create a work space) can make it "our" writing instead of, "Can't you see I'm working here? Just watch t.v. and leave me alone!" ;o)

MARY: It’s hard, let’s face it.  Kids are kids and sometimes rational discourse just doesn’t work. J  But I did my best to trade respect for respect.  It was always a trade.

“I know you want to go to the park, but I have to finish this chapter. If you guys can be quiet and watch TV/read/ play for two hours, we’ll go spend the afternoon at the park.”

Yeah, I had to remind ‘em sometimes, but I always carried out my part of the bargain and I made it a peer exchange rather than a bribe or a threat.  ‘I need this, so I’ll trade you that’.  That worked well for us.

CHYNNA: That’s awesome, Mary. What inspires you in your writing? Where do your ideas come from?

MARY: Oh gosh, ideas are everywhere. I get inspired by people, by news stories and magazine articles, by possibilities, by strange connections and conflicts that can make us think.

Make us think.

I keep saying that, don’t I? But that is really why I write. Because I think all the time, wonder about things, and I guess I just want everybody else to do that, too. Why is he so sad?  Why does this marriage work?  What will happen if we really live in space?  What if he didn’t really kill her but just wanted her dead?

CHYNNA: Well, I can honestly tell you I say “Make us think” all the time now because of you. [Laughs] Can you go into more detail about your writing relationship with Stan Schmidt and how he helped keep you plugging along? Can you go into more detail about Clarion West?

MARY: Actually, Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimovs Magazine, really gave me my break.  He published me--he published me a lot.  I got featured as one of the top ten authors on Asimov’s in terms of stories published a few years back.

Stan Schmidt, editor of Analog, turned down my very first story submission and scribbled me a note with lots of exclamation points.  He hated the ending. Of course, what I didn’t realize was that meant he had loved the story and thought he’d buy it and then the ending sucked. Well, it did.

When I timidly asked him at a conference if he wanted to see a revision he scolded me: “Of course I want to see a revision or I wouldn’t have spent all that time on the story.”

Well, I had painted myself into a corner and never did make the ending work to my satisfaction, but it was a cool start and the story got me accepted to Clarion West Writers Workshop…where I will be an instructor in 2008. Talk about full circle!  Woohoo!

Clarion West is a six week long, very intense, bootcamp for writers.  I wrote 60,000 words in six weeks and sold my first story to Gardner Dozois.  I sold my goat herd to pay for it and got a friend with girls my sons’ ages to take my kids in for six weeks.

CHYNNA: It must have been heart-wrenching for you to sell your goat herd to pay for Clarion West and be apart from your children for six entire weeks (I don't think I could do that!) How did that experience inspire/complete you as a writer, a mom and a person? (You must have had sooo many different feelings swarming around during that time!)
 
MARY: It was very hard. I really felt that this was important--important enough to shake up our lives over. I missed my kids a LOT and they missed me. But you know what? I sure knew the cost of what I had signed up for. I wrote 60,000 words in my six weeks there, and made my first sale. I busted my behind! But it was sure great to hug my kids again. J I called ‘em a lot.

CHYNNA: Boy, I admire you for that. You are so strong! Can you go into detail about your nonfiction accomplishments (where did you write, how you dealt with rejection—if any, tips, etc.)

MARY: I did nonfiction before I did fiction (fiction writers are born with that scarlet “W” on their foreheads remember?) I was doing research in fetal endocrine systems (I have a bio background) before my first son was born and had published a paper in a scientific journal.  Why not try NF I thought? That was fun!

So I tried and landed a monthly column with my first query!!!  Countryside and Small Stock Journal.  I did that and sold some other pieces in the farm/garden/livestock universe. It was going well, but then I thought, “Why not try an actual story?”  That was the Analog story, and I had so much fun, this was so wonderful (I hadn’t gotten Stan’s exclamation pointed rejection yet) that I applied to Clarion West.  And got accepted. That pretty much ended my NF career.  J

CHYNNA: I had no idea you were a fetal endocrine researcher! That is SO impressive! As a person who writes both academically (for psych) and creatively (for freelancing/novel writing), I can relate to how different the two styles are. Did you write in school? How were you influenced to write NF from your Journal writing? (It must have driven you crazy to write in the stiff AMA writing-style! LOL)

MARY: Ah, writing for science journals is a very tight discipline.  We had a house editor at the research facility where I worked. Actually, that paper made me bolder. Anything was easier than this!  And more fun.  J

I realized I had a skillset to sell and tried a query letter. Ended up with a monthly column, how’s that for luck? That NF success encouraged me to try my fiction next.

CHYNNA: Facinating! Does your background in bio influence your SF writings at all?

MARY: Of course! Most of my SF started out in the biosciences and ecology. I now have a wealth of knowledge about space habitats and long term space travel, but research has always been easier because I had a strong science vocabulary to start with. 

CHYNNA: Okay, let’s talk about your first novel and how did it come to be?

MARY: I was getting published in short fiction, breaking in nicely and really wanted to write a novel. I wrote one and actually got an agent although she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the novel (it was just not very good).  Then I published three novelettes in Asimov’s about a global warming future (the science was there, even back in the early nineties, folks, nobody was paying attention!) and they got great reviews and critical attention.  I wanted to continue the characters in a novel, my agent encouraged me and I wrote “The Drylands”. It sold to Del Rey (Random House).  I just re-released it as “Water Rites” from Fairwood Press (www.fairwoodpress.com), including the original three novelettes that complete the dramatic arc. 

CHYNNA: That is so inspiring! How and when did you become involved with Long Ridge? Your students certainly LOVE you.

MARY: I got invited to an arts festival up in White Salmon, Washington. The woman running it was an ICL instructor and insisted I would be an excellent LR instructor. I wasn’t so sure.  I knew people who worked for the Writers Digest school and I was not impressed.  But I let her contact LR, they contacted me, I was very impressed with the course and the rest, as they say, is history. 

CHYNNA: And there are many students who are grateful you decided to do it! If there is one lesson to be learned about writing/getting published you can give to another “Writing Mama,” what would it be?

MARY: If it matters to you, DO it. Figure out how to make it happen. Just be stubborn. Put your kids first, your writing second, and all else takes up the hindmost.  Bottom line: If it matters to you, DO it.

CHYNNA: Awesome advice, Mary. What are good ways writers/writing Moms can "network" in order to get their work noticed? (Especially if they don't have alot of time, money or resources of their own.)

MARY: The Internet is a great networking place. In the SF/fantasy universe we have Broad Universe a coalition of women writing in the spec fiction universe.  We have an internet group where people post, and we convene at writers conferences to staff a table selling each others’ works and to do readings together for the public. This kind of “writers together’ group is pretty easy to set up.  Do a Yahoo Group. It’s free.

CHYNNA: What a great idea! That would certainly help to be able to reach out to writers in the same genre. Okay, now for a question for the LR teaching guru: What, in your opinion, makes a "good" query letter and what do we need to avoid in them? (I actually saved the first query that worked and tweak it for each place I send it to!)

MARY: I have a “What is a good query” article up on the LR website in Writing Craft: Nonfiction: Writing the Strong Nonfiction Query Letter: http://www.longridgewritersgroup.com/rx/wc02/writing_the_strong_query_letter.shtml

It’s all about making what you have to offer clear to the editor.

CHYNNA: Thanks, Mary. I have read that one. Any advice? Any upcoming projects we should watch out for?

MARY: Tor Books asked for two more books, so that’s waiting in the wings. I tried “alternate history” (what would the world be like if something had gone down differently) and had a ball, so I may try that.

Just watch my website for news of what’s out. www.maryrosenblum.com My current SF novel, “Horizons” will be out in paperback from Tor Books in November. MUCH cheaper than the hardcover. “Water Rites” is available from www.fairwoodpress.com  This is our future unless we reverse global warming. 

CHYNNA: I, for one, will be checking your site for updates. I’m curious, Mary--how do your kids feel about your successful writing career?

MARY: They’re happy with it. They read my stuff--it’s part of our life.

CHYNNA: That’s so great. I’ll be they are so proud of you. One last question: I loved the line, "Writers were born, after all...with the scarlet W on their foreheads..." I had the same view. Then you give tidbits that you were born a writer when you were able to make up stories if you had no books nearby. In retrospect, did anyone hear any of those stories and encourage you to keep telling them?

MARY: Oh, gosh, I WISH.  That’s really why I do as much support, teaching, help for novice writers as I do.  Because I would have given anything to have someone take some interest in my story telling.

CHYNNA: Mary, if I’d been one of those lucky people to have heard your stories, I’d have been the one to encourage you to keep going. But you didn’t need that because it sounds like you developed that perseverance all on your own. ;)

I hope Mary’s words inspire you to keep motivated, fellow writers and writing mamas. Just keep her words close to your heart whenever you feel like giving up: “Put your kids first, your writing second, and all else takes up the hindmost.  Bottom line: If it matters to you, DO it.”

Please visit Mary's website at: http://theflyingparty.com/maryrosenblum/ You can also visit and chat on the Long Ridge Writers' Group chat rooms. If you're a writer, it's a great place to network. If you aren't, it's a great place to meet and chat with a bunch of awesome people.