Striking Gold
Las Cruces author wins award for Yellowstone thriller, is nominated for romance novel.
When last we left novelist Linda Jacobs, she'd just published her second Yellowstone Park-based thriller, Rain of Fire (Medallion Press, see the June 2006 Desert Exposure). Packing for her book tour and hard at work on her second romance novel, the Las Cruces author was having fun juggling writing genres and looking forward to revisiting Yellowstone, the inspirational national park that serves as a golden touchstone for her writing success.
Little did she know that news of her first literary award would be waiting back home after her trip, in a bin full of several weeks of mail.
"I thought it was a newsletter or something, since I am a member of Women Writing the West," Jacobs says. "What a surprise when the first sentence said, 'Congratulations! Your book, Summer of Fire, has been selected as the 2006 winner of the WILLA Literary Awards for Original Soft Cover.'"
The award is named for Willa Sibert Cather, the early 20th-century muckraking journalist who later turned novelist and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her work, One of Ours. She's probably best known for her 1918 novel about settling the prairie, My Antonia. Looking to the Nebraska prairies of her youth for inspiration, Cather was known for writing about ordinary people in plainspoken language. The WILLA Literary Awards honor authors whose work may be reminiscent of that aspect of Cather's writing, and are bestowed annually for outstanding works featuring women's stories set in the West.
"I am extremely honored to be mentioned in the same breath with her," Jacobs says of Cather. Though she'd placed as a finalist before in several contests, Jacobs says this is the first time one of her books has won a literary prize.
Receiving the award is "particularly sweet," she adds, "because I once got a rejection letter from a senior VP of a major New York (publishing) house that said, 'There is no great literary sensibility at work here.'" That criticism may have been designed to discourage her, but Jacobs came away with her feelings intact and got her just rewards as well.
"I believe that I write commercial fiction, not literary," she explains, "but it doesn't hurt my feelings a bit that the WILLA is called a 'literary award.'"
And as if success in one genre weren't enough, Jacobs also learned that her first romance novel, Children of Dynasty, written under her penname of Christine Carroll, was nominated for a 2005 Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award in the category of Best Small Press Romance. The organization's staff of more than 50 reviewers in the women's fiction industry selects the nominees and chooses the winners for that award.
"Unfortunately, I didn't win that one," Jacobs says. "But being nominated for a Reviewer's Choice Award puts one in the top percentile of the 2,500 or more books reviewed each year by Romantic Times Book Club, so the nomination is a fabulous honor."
Coming home to news of the awards capped a successful Yellowstone signing tour. "I had a blast," Jacobs says. "I signed over a hundred books in Old Faithful Inn and the Lake Hotel lobbies."
Since the signings were outside the gift shop and not in a bookstore, Jacobs' audience was not the usual meet-the-author group. "It was an interesting crowd," she admits. In fact, the most frequent questions she was asked were not about her work, she says, but were along the lines of, "Where is the restroom? What time does the geyser go off next? Where can I get something to eat?" and "Where did you buy your turquoise bracelet?"
Yet, for all that, Jacobs had an encouraging 75 percent success rate in selling her work to folks who stopped and looked at her books. "A number of people said they had heard of them, so that was great," she says.
In June, when Jacobs' second Yellowstone book had just been released, she had already completed that first romance novel and was working on its sequel, The Senator's Daughter, also set in the San Francisco Bay area. Hoping to strike more gold with her Golden Gate theme, Jacobs is now hard at work on a proposal for a third book in that series, under the working title Sins of the Fathers.
Seeming to thrive on switching genres, Jacobs found time between signing books and watching Old Faithful to do research for further work on a series of historical novels, what her agent is calling the "Yellowstone Country series."
"These ladies' ancestors," Jacobs says of the characters in her two prior Yellowstone-based books, "will feature in three more set in the Yellowstone country." She has completed the first of the Yellowstone Country books and has written proposals for the other two in the series.
This historical fiction series covers the time period from 1870 through 1927, and follows the family saga of women "who come to the West and have their lives forever changed by the experience," she says.
Come to think of it—having gazed upon the wonders of Yellowstone and turned it into an award-winning novel—that's a storyline not unlike Linda Jacobs' own life.
—Donna Clayton Lawder
For more on author Linda Jacobs,
see her Web site, www.readlindajacobs.com
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