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Linda
didn’t attend college until she was 29. “I was certainly not a writer,”
she said, when I asked if writing came first for her. She graduated in
1990 with a degree in landscape architecture, but the economy was
terrible and she couldn’t find a job. So, she returned to school in l992
and earned a master’s degree in land planning. And then she went into
land development, because that was where the money was. “I wanted to be a
landscape architect for the Forest Service,” she said, “but that didn’t
work out.” Although Linda didn’t study writing in college, she had
taken a creative writing class, where she wrote an essay about fighting
her first fire.
In
2005, she ended her 23-year marriage. Shortly thereafter, she lost her
job. Unemployed for the next two years, she decided to spend her free
time writing about her firefighting experiences. “I kept detailed
journals,” she said. She didn’t want to forget the stories. First, she
wrote 90 pages and sent it to friends. They told her to keep writing. “I
got out my journals and started to write, and I wrote 400 more pages.”
Her local newspaper interviewed her, and they connected Linda to a local
author, who had published traditionally. This author encouraged her to
join a writers group. Linda learned a lot, but eventually she was ready
to leave that group. “I figured, [I] have everything I need to finish
this book and make it right. I no longer need that writers group.” As
all writers know, not every writing group is created equal, and some of
us do better
without a group at all—perhaps this is most true for book-writers. It is
tough to get full feedback in a group setting.
Over
the course of two years, Linda queried over 200 agents. She also
queried small publishers. After waiting for agent replies that never
came, she said, “I chose Bedazzled Ink Publishing in California, and I
have no regrets.”
Her
book was published in 2018. Linda said, “2018 was a big fire year.
California was burning up. All the west was burning up. It was good for
my book, but it was also tragic. A lot of homes were lost. Every time
when fire season starts, a whole new interest in fire damages
[emerges].” Linda said that the book isn’t just about firefighting.
“It’s about how I figured out how to do that job in a world where women
are not welcome.”
Linda
said that her idea of writing success was getting her story out there.
“Total strangers have picked it up and said, ‘This is a really great
story…’ I had this career that I loved more than anything, but it all
fell apart. It all fell apart, and then... I figured out how to rebuild
my life. I’m grateful that my story is out there. I had a great career,
one that most men and women wouldn’t want to do. Yes, it all fell apart,
but that wasn’t the end of the story. Everybody has a different take on
my book. What’s interesting is that most of my readers are men, and
some of those men have written really amazing reviews. One guy started
out with ‘I was thinking what kind of person actually wants to fight
fires? And I discovered by the time I finished that book, a perfectly
normal one.’”
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