NEW! A free short story by G.M.S. Altman to read right now! Just click A SHORT STORY on the menu to go to "SALMON MAN."
From JERSEY SHORE to FLORIDA BEACH...
G.M.S. Altman started off in New Jersey but was kidnapped and forced to live in Florida the rest of her life. (Okay, that's not really true. She was taken there by her mother and grandparents when they relocated because a doctor thought her Grandpa's asthma would be better in the heat and humidity of the south. She went to school at Florida State University in Tallahassee and never got around to leaving. Now her roots are too deeply planted to want to go anywhere else.)
Getting older but not yet too decrepit, retired from a mind-numbing, soul-killing office job, she now works doing what she loves: writing. A little non-fiction....a lot of fiction... she finds a never-ending supply of cool and weird stuff out there from which to craft her plots.
Some friends find her quirky, a few think she's a curmudgeon-in-training, most know she's crazy enough to have the audacity to write books she believes are good enough for others to enjoy.
Please check out her AUTHOR'S BIO, her SHORT STORIES, and her various BOOKS from the menu above.... and thanks for visiting.
* * * * *
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR? Keep going....
More About Me...and the Audacity to Write a Book
I've been writing most of my life, but it wasn't until I reached middle age before I became convinced I could write a whole book. I'd written short pieces including, for a short time, a column for our local newspaper. But a book? With hundreds of pages?
But then one day, fired up with anger over what I considered a desparaging book about my childhood hero, Beethoven, I dashed off a furious article in rebuttal. I intended to submit it to the Journal of the Beethoven Society. But before I knew it, I'd penned 23 pages and I hadn't yet begun to address all the issues I had with the idiots spewing untrue and highly insulting garbage about "my" Beethoven.
"This should be a book!" I fumed.
"So make it a book," my husband suggested.
"Could I write a whole book?"
"I have no doubt," he said, having been subjected to my lengthy and passionate rants and raves on the subject.
And so I did.
My first book (Beethoven: A Man of His Word) was published in 1996. I was praised, I was lambasted. I got fan mail. I got hate mail.
Non-fiction can be a bitch.
Yet I wrote another one in 1999, also about Beethoven, (Fatal Links: The Curious Deaths of Beethoven and the Two Napoleons) this time about his death by poisoning (and to counter yet another desparaging book on the subject).
A little praise, fewer sneers.
A big fight with a not-so-nice fellow author (who shall remain nameless but this guy thought there was actual LEAD in a "lead" pencil!)
Conclusion: non-fiction was too much of a bitch for me to want to keep writing it.
Still, I liked to write, wanted to write, needed to write. I had lots of ideas for stories in my brain and it seemed as if every day some newspaper article or TV show would give me new plots I wanted to explore.
Fiction seemed like it would be a friendlier medium.
I retired from the school system where I'd worked for 30 long years... and that's when I discovered the National Write-a-Novel-in-a-Month Contest." That was 2004. My first writing challenge... a life-changing year. The task: write a novel of at least 50,000 words in a month (November 1-30) That was around 1,700 words a day. Piece of cake.
I met that challenge handily and ended up with what I thought was a pretty good first draft of a novel. I edited it. It got even better. I began to think other people might actually like to read it. (That's where the audacity starts to kick in.)
Writing fiction was fun!
Writing fiction was not a bitch! (Well...not TOO much of a bitch, and besides the research was fun AND cool, even though I suspect th FBI is monitoring my activities.)
Publishing fiction was the bitch!
(And this wasn't even taking into account making my author's ego kowtow to an editor who would want to change my words, my voice. I choose words not only for their meaning but for their sound. I don't choose them lightly. I don't want them changed lightly, either.)
Fortunately, along came Amazon.com and CreateSpace and the whole wonderful concept of Publishing on Demand (POD, for short).
No, it's not the big time, but they allow me to write my books, my way. Of course I have readers and proofers so that the end result is as professional as humanly possible, but these people are suggestors, not editors.
What you get is me, not a version of me.
Take a look, won't you? Ego aside, I think my stories are pretty good. Some are written in third person, most in first. I like the way first person point-of-view lets me feel like I'm telling my reader a story. I like that sort of intimacy....I hope you will, too.
You won't find a lot of gore in my books. There's usually a little violence, but no gratuitous sex, either. I believe in leaving some things to the imaginaton. Most have a spiritual or supernatural bent.
I believe people like to taste something before they want the whole pie so you'll find first chapters or prologues here for each book so you can check them out without making any more of an investment than a few minutes of your time. I hope they'll leave you wanting more.
If so, I have plenty of books to choose from and more to come as I try to write two books a year, on average.
But if not, that's okay...I'll just thank you for troubling yourself to give me a try.
Getting older but not yet too decrepit, retired from a mind-numbing, soul-killing office job, she now works doing what she loves: writing. A little non-fiction....a lot of fiction... she finds a never-ending supply of cool and weird stuff out there from which to craft her plots.
Some friends find her quirky, a few think she's a curmudgeon-in-training, most know she's crazy enough to have the audacity to write books she believes are good enough for others to enjoy.
Please check out her AUTHOR'S BIO, her SHORT STORIES, and her various BOOKS from the menu above.... and thanks for visiting.
* * * * *
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR? Keep going....
More About Me...and the Audacity to Write a Book
I've been writing most of my life, but it wasn't until I reached middle age before I became convinced I could write a whole book. I'd written short pieces including, for a short time, a column for our local newspaper. But a book? With hundreds of pages?
But then one day, fired up with anger over what I considered a desparaging book about my childhood hero, Beethoven, I dashed off a furious article in rebuttal. I intended to submit it to the Journal of the Beethoven Society. But before I knew it, I'd penned 23 pages and I hadn't yet begun to address all the issues I had with the idiots spewing untrue and highly insulting garbage about "my" Beethoven.
"This should be a book!" I fumed.
"So make it a book," my husband suggested.
"Could I write a whole book?"
"I have no doubt," he said, having been subjected to my lengthy and passionate rants and raves on the subject.
And so I did.
My first book (Beethoven: A Man of His Word) was published in 1996. I was praised, I was lambasted. I got fan mail. I got hate mail.
Non-fiction can be a bitch.
Yet I wrote another one in 1999, also about Beethoven, (Fatal Links: The Curious Deaths of Beethoven and the Two Napoleons) this time about his death by poisoning (and to counter yet another desparaging book on the subject).
A little praise, fewer sneers.
A big fight with a not-so-nice fellow author (who shall remain nameless but this guy thought there was actual LEAD in a "lead" pencil!)
Conclusion: non-fiction was too much of a bitch for me to want to keep writing it.
Still, I liked to write, wanted to write, needed to write. I had lots of ideas for stories in my brain and it seemed as if every day some newspaper article or TV show would give me new plots I wanted to explore.
Fiction seemed like it would be a friendlier medium.
I retired from the school system where I'd worked for 30 long years... and that's when I discovered the National Write-a-Novel-in-a-Month Contest." That was 2004. My first writing challenge... a life-changing year. The task: write a novel of at least 50,000 words in a month (November 1-30) That was around 1,700 words a day. Piece of cake.
I met that challenge handily and ended up with what I thought was a pretty good first draft of a novel. I edited it. It got even better. I began to think other people might actually like to read it. (That's where the audacity starts to kick in.)
Writing fiction was fun!
Writing fiction was not a bitch! (Well...not TOO much of a bitch, and besides the research was fun AND cool, even though I suspect th FBI is monitoring my activities.)
Publishing fiction was the bitch!
(And this wasn't even taking into account making my author's ego kowtow to an editor who would want to change my words, my voice. I choose words not only for their meaning but for their sound. I don't choose them lightly. I don't want them changed lightly, either.)
Fortunately, along came Amazon.com and CreateSpace and the whole wonderful concept of Publishing on Demand (POD, for short).
No, it's not the big time, but they allow me to write my books, my way. Of course I have readers and proofers so that the end result is as professional as humanly possible, but these people are suggestors, not editors.
What you get is me, not a version of me.
Take a look, won't you? Ego aside, I think my stories are pretty good. Some are written in third person, most in first. I like the way first person point-of-view lets me feel like I'm telling my reader a story. I like that sort of intimacy....I hope you will, too.
You won't find a lot of gore in my books. There's usually a little violence, but no gratuitous sex, either. I believe in leaving some things to the imaginaton. Most have a spiritual or supernatural bent.
I believe people like to taste something before they want the whole pie so you'll find first chapters or prologues here for each book so you can check them out without making any more of an investment than a few minutes of your time. I hope they'll leave you wanting more.
If so, I have plenty of books to choose from and more to come as I try to write two books a year, on average.
But if not, that's okay...I'll just thank you for troubling yourself to give me a try.