Overworked and Underslept

I’m giving an Author Talk at the Butler Library tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt from my Talk:

People who don’t know me ask where I come up with my story ideas. People who know me know my stories are about me. In Writer School, they tell you to start out by Writing What You Know. My stories are usually about something that affected me—either deeply or on a humorous level, and so I tell the story so that you can share in that feeling with me.

Case in point: After college at Pitt I went to Washington, D.C. for my first job, doing editing and secretary work for lobbyists. I was living and working in our nation’s capital, getting into the daily grind, wearing suits all day, learning the ropes alongside tourists and political people and everyone in between. I was working in an office with four other people, and not meeting anyone else, and I felt like something was missing. So I started moonlighting as a coffee waitress in a trendy café in the evenings. And that’s when my life took off.

So I’m working by day, working by evening, and just going for it, ya know? I’m overworked, underslept, and really having a pretty good time. In that crazy café, on any given night we’d have politicians, celebrities, a mugger, police--It was pure chaos.

But I got to a place where I could look around at the chaos, as if time stood still for a moment, and I felt a sense of belonging and connection. I mean, we’re all just spinning on this planet together. In those moments I felt so connected and so alive.

And I thought no one who comes here is going to see this place like I do. They’ll see the beauty of Washington, D.C., sure, and they might even see the muck and dirt and crime. Sure. But they won’t feel this.

Unless I tell the story. So I wrote it.

Upside Down Kingdom is my first book, published under my maiden name Jody Brown. It’s historic fiction—If I said it rained that day, it rained that day. But I took things that happened to me and to my friends and dumped all these situations on my main character….

If you’re in town, stop by tomorrow at the Butler Area Public Library on N. McKean Street in Butler, Pennsylvania for more of the story.