Web contest authorized young writer of thrillers
The Internet is rife with potential to make savvy users rich or well-known, but with so many trying at once to push their services, skills and scams, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Finding success often takes as much luck as skill. Just ask Lexington stay-at-home mom and newly published author Amanda Crum.
Amanda Crum, a freelance writer from Lexington, Kentucky, unleashes her debut novel
"The Fireman's Daughter," a mysterious tapestry of familial loss, intrigue and illusion.
"The Fireman's Daughter" renders the story of a young woman who is trying to unravel
the mysteries of her mother's life and untimely drowning that occurred while she
was just a child. She seeks answers from her estranged father, entering a proverbial
rabbit hole, raising more questions and putting her life in jeopardy as she learns
about a strange coincidence and a gift that she had inherited from her mother.
"There was definitely some luck involved," said Crum, who is also known as Mandy.
Crum recently took third place in an online novel-writing competition. The prize? A publishing deal. Her first novel, The Fireman's Daughter, is available now for about $21 at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and PublishingRoom.com.
Her lucky break blossomed from unlucky circumstances. She had been working as the assistant manager at Disc Jockey, a music store in The Mall at Lexington Green, when the business closed last year. Crum was pregnant with her daughter, Kyra, so she decided to take some time off rather than look for another job.
"It was horrible that I lost my job, but if I hadn't, I never would have had time to finish the story," she said.
Pregnancy was a natural cure for writer's block. She had started The Fireman's Daughter several years before but had set it aside, unsure where the story was going.
"I have a few friends who have kids who told me the creative juices just flow while you're pregnant, and it did. I don't know what it was, if it was the hormones or what," Crum said. "I painted a lot. I did sketches. I did a little mural in Kyra's room on the closet. Creativity just flows all over the place."
The Web site that sponsored the contest is WritingRoom.com, a community for writers. Users can upload stories, read the works of others, browse nearly 2,000 registered users and participate in "campfire stories," where one person starts a story and anyone can add a paragraph until it's finished.
"My husband randomly came across that site at work and sent the link to me," Crum said. "That was before we even knew about the contest. I saw an ad for the contest later.
"It was just a place for me to post my writings and have other writers critique what I had done. It was a place for me to meet other writers online, sort of like a MySpace-type thing where you can network and bounce ideas off each other and get feedback."
Users also can pay to publish their work at PublishingRoom.com, WritingRoom's sister Web site, which Crum says she never considered doing. As third-place winner of WritingRoom's emerging author contest, she received the full PublishingRoom package, including printing and marketing, for free.
The contest, which drew almost 100 participants, was open to thriller writers only. Crum's love affair with thrillers began when, as a child, she read her mother's copy of Stephen King's It.
"My mom thought that it was way too adult for me and too scary, because I think I was about 10," Crum said. "But the cover art I'd seen on her bookshelf, with the green hand sticking out of the sewer grate, forever intrigued me. My hands were itching to get a hold of it and read it."
Even today, Crum cites King as a major influence, evident by a bookshelf full of his novels in her living room.
"It was just a place for me to post my writings and have other writers critique what I had done. It was a place for me to meet other writers online, sort of like a MySpace-type thing where you can network and bounce ideas off each other and get feedback."
"I just can't get over how he writes his characters," she said. "He's able to develop a back story for the characters ... and create a real life for them so they're not just cardboard, wooden characters no one cares about."
King's influence can be seen in The Fireman's Daughter. The protagonist, Andrea, seeks to unravel the mystery of her mother's death in the Kentucky River. Andrea suspects her father knows more about the drowning than he lets on, and after a nine-year estrangement from him, she ventures home to find answers.
The story takes as much influence from Crum's own life as it does from King's writing style. The small hometown Andrea returns to is Winchester, where Crum grew up. And the city where Andrea lives as an adult is Lexington.
However, there are some intentional discrepancies. In The Fireman's Daughter, and Crum's other completed but unpublished stories, the locations are fictionalized versions of their real-life counterparts. For example, the distance between the two cities is exaggerated.
"In the book I made it seem like Lexington and Winchester were farther away, because Andrea wanted to put more miles between herself and her hometown," Crum said. "And Lexington is like this huge city in the story."
Some landmarks do make an appearance, such as the Engine House Deli in Winchester, where Crum used to eat as a child.
The novel also mirrors Crum's estrangement from her father, whom she hasn't talked to in several months, and only sporadically before that. She said their relationship has been strained since her parents' divorce when she was 11.
Recently, Crum entered her second novel, The Wilds, in a contest with St. Martin's Minotaur, the mystery, crime and thriller imprint of St. Martin's Press in New York.
Her husband, Chris, a staff writer at WebProNews.com, thinks The Wilds is better than The Fireman's Daughter. "Her writing style has improved between them, and her presentation and storytelling," he said. "It's more original."
Crum will receive royalties from The Fireman's Daughter when sales pick up.
"I would love to make this my job," she said.