You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/ or connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.
📙Thank you for your time in answering our questions about getting published. Let’s begin by having you explain to us why you decided to become an author and pen this book?
I grew up in a military family. My father was a pilot, first in the Marine Corps and later in the Army. He tested new planes, taught others how to fly them, as was himself a fighter pilot. We moved every two years, according to the Defense Department’s demands. Fighter Pilot’s Daughter tracks this complicated experience during the middle years of the Cold War.
In those days, the dangers of nuclear war were on most Americans’ minds. That and the “domino theory”—the idea that if one country went communist, others nearby would do the same—kept fear alive in us. The theory suggested that one country’s succumbing to communisim meant the whole world would soon be controlled by the Soviet Union. Those fears thrived in our household, just as it they did everywhere in American life.
The high anxiety of the Cold War meant my father was often away from home. Waiting on a ship off the coast of Guatemala for the start of an invasion, investigating a fly-over of the Soviet border in northern Turkey, keeping tuned to news from the Fulda Gap on the border of West and East Germany—in these and other situations too frightening for my sisters and I to know about, my father kept us in suspense from far away. We were happy when he came home, but without meaning to, he frightened us. He’d walk through the door, his head nearly touching the ceiling, his blue eyes lit with a long-distance gaze. He didn’t seem to have landed. He had gifts. He told stories. But he wasn’t really home yet, and we weren’t sure who he was.
When my mother and sisters and I went with my Dad to new postings, we’d be excited by the prospect of seeing the new place but distraught at leaving friends behind. Tension grew between my parents. My mother was proud of my father’s accomplishments and at the same time angry with him for making her leave one home after another, never settling down. The strife between them was also fed by the dangers inherent in Dad’s work and by the steady nervousness in the air that World War III was just around the corner. They drank cocktails to ease the strain. They fought, their voices taut with anger and fear. They weren’t happy. Nobody was.
By the time I was ready for college, I’d been to 14 schools—a bewildering way to grow up. As I got older, my childhood faith in Dad grew cloudy. In the news and in the streets, I heard arguments against what he was doing—fighting the war in Vietnam, flying for a government that was killing civilians. I took a political stance against him, and our own Cold War developed. For years we didn’t speak. Finally, when he was retired and I had settled down into marriage and teaching, we found our way back to each other, happily and gratefully reconciled.
Not long after, I started thinking about a book what would sort out what it had all meant. I made lists of all the schools and the places we called “home”; and of the government’s moves that drove ours. At a certain point, I put it all together in a first draft. Writing helped me make sense of not just how my sisters and I came through these chaotic times. It helped me see what our parents endured. After several more drafts, I had a 320 page story of our time I titled Fighter Pilot’s Daughter
📙Is this your first book?
No. I’ve written two books of cultural analysis—Recalling the Wild (about the closing of the American West) and Public Native America (about tribal casinos, museums and powwows), both published by Rutgers University Press. And I’ve just completed a novel, The Translators, about a pair of itinerant foreigners in medieval Spain.
📙With this particular book, how did you publish – traditional, small press, Indie, etc. – and why did you choose this method?
My agent found a receptive ear with Rowman and Littlefield. The editors there were interested in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter as it was, without asking for lots of changes. So we both decided to go with them. They’ve since been taken over by Bloomsbury, but traditionally, they’ve done a lot of books about military experience, so it seemed like a good fit for this story of a military family. They have good distribution, and the paperback edition came out a couple of years later.
📙Can you tell us a little about your publishing journey? The pros and cons?
First I found an agent, Neil Salkind who was interested in the memoir genre. He was wonderful and placed the book quickly. These days it’s difficult to find a publisher who’ll look at your manuscript if it doesn’t come through an agent, so I was very happy Neil took me on. I think there are a few publishing houses that accept manuscripts directly from authors, but it’s really important to find an agent. They know what to trust and what not to, what to look for in a contract and what to expect from a publisher. And the publishers trust them to have vetted people who approach them, so the publisher can count on the agent’s authors being reliably strong writers. It’s difficult to go about the process on your own, so I’d advise everyone to try to find an agent first.
📙What lessons do you feel you learned about your particular publishing journey and about the publishing industry as a whole?
I’ve learned to be patient! Sometimes it seems as if agents and publishers move at glacial speed, but that’s only because they’re so incredibly busy. It takes them a long time to get to your manuscript when they have so many other already waiting for attention. You really have to learn to wait. And I learned to accept rejection without being stopped in my tracks by it. Publishers and agents are always reminding you that their responses are subjective, and it’s true: one editor’s or agent’s view will be entirely different from another’s. So I learned not to get too down when I’m rejected and to keep sending the book back out there!
📙Would you recommend this method of publishing to other authors?
As I mentioned above, Rowman & Littlefield has been taken over by Bloomsbury. I haven’t had any dealings with the new group yet, so I can’t say anything about how it is to work with them, but generally speaking I can say that Bloomsbury has a very fine, even venerable reputation.
📙What’s the best advice you can give to aspiring authors?
Keep at it, every day. Listen to the words that sail through your mind, however briefly or dimly. They’re worth listening to and using. Remember doubt is part of the process: don’t let it stop you or get you down.
Fighter Pilot's Daughter is available at Amazon.
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