Guest Post: To Dance With Ugly People by Lorene Stunson Hill

Do you believe dreams can come true?

Available on Amazon US and Amazon UK

I was a writer that had a fear of my protagonist or antagonist embarrassing, cruel or stupid moments being seen as truths about me. I worried that there would be readers out there feeling that I had revealed too much about myself. I do have a fear of confrontation and as far back as I can remember I have written. When angry, as a child, I wrote notes and stuck on doors, as an employee I placed notes on desks of co-workers and as a wife (now divorced) I wrote letters and placed under the dinner plate. Oh and there are many letters of protest, love or rage that has been dropped in my nearby mailbox. But, when it came to writing a book there was a sudden fear. I wrote anyway. As a teenager I hand wrote a book every summer while school was out and at the end of the summer, tossed it in the trash, terrified someone would find out something terrible about me.

Finally, in my late twenties, I took Creative Writing classes at the University of Central Florida. My instructor's name was Wyatt Wyatt, an unusual man with an unusual name. I took many of his courses. One day he invited me to his office, one of the weirdest rooms I'd ever seen. Odd and unusual things including NUDE MANNEQUINS and a COUCH were placed in there. It was an end of the semester conference and once we were seated, he screamed COWARD at me! I sat there stunned! I learned from him that the best fiction often reflects some aspect of the author. It's almost impossible to write anything that doesn't have some part of you in it. As for as which parts, of my book, reflects me, I keep my readers guessing. The first question I get from those who read my book, that know me, is, “Is that TRUE?!” My answer, “If you wonder, then the book is well written.”

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. My life career was in Insurance – Automobile Insurance. In 1999 that career ended and I worked for a Job Placement/Unemployment office at the Front Desk. The stories you hear! After surgery, in 2005, I was laid off from that job. Broke, I wrote the first manuscript by hand, I had something to say. Then I typed it on an old computer/printer I dug out of the dust of a thrift store called, “Our Fathers Closet.” I started it as therapy to get through tough times, despair of being where I was in life, after a lifetime of working so hard and many family disappointments. I felt it deserved to be published, but I couldn't seem to create a Query Letter interesting enough to catch an Agents eye. “Not interested,” was many of my first rejections, so it sat it on a shelf for EIGHT years. I pulled it out of the dust during a recent move and decided to self-publish as an EBook and paperback.

I want to tell my audience that you have to get inside of the mind of any character you create to do it justice. If you can't do that, the book won't be very good. You don't have to kill someone to get inside the mind of a killer. Some authors chose to be reclusive to avoid addressing these issues, but people will think whatever they want to think. I read an article once that stated, “A great writer is one who is not scared of what people think of them and their writing. They are the ones who can take a bad situation they know about or have experienced and turn it into a great story. You should not be scared of what your pen bleeds on to the paper, just let your heart and soul talk to your readers.”

Lorene Stunson Hill

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About The Author

Lorene Stunson Hill is a new aspiring author from Florida, USA.  Her first novel, To Dance with Ugly People, is published as an E-book and paperback.  Lorene grew up in Detroit, Michigan then moved to central Florida. Her life was not as she would have wished it to be; one of ease and luxury.  In fact the opposite was true yet she wished to make it more than it was and tell her story, warts and all, to help others and  help bring something good from misery.  "To Dance with Ugly People” draws on the wealth of experiences placed in her path. Along that path she completed Creative Writing Courses at the University of Central Florida under the esteemed guidance of Professor Wyatt Wyatt. Follow Lorene on Twitter @Hill008  and on Facebook.