Nancy Butts

From www.nancybutts.com

Nancy Butts has had her head stuck in a book ever since she learned to read--and she's been writing stories for just as long. Her younger sisters still tease her about how she used to hide out in the coat closet just to find a quiet place to read, and even today she is still looking for the perfect sanctuary where she can sneak away to write.

She published her first poem at age ten, and decided after reading Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" in fifth grade that she wanted to be a writer, too. But she never thought she was good enough, so by the sixth grade she decided to be an astronomer instead: and after that a lawyer, Congresswoman, spy, and finally a doctor. And if she hadn't gone to Duke University, where she learned that in order to be premed she had to hang out in chemistry lectures with 500 other students, she might be a doctor today. Instead, she took a seminar in Zen Buddhism and decided that spending all her time talking about big ideas in small classes with bearded professors was what college was supposed to be about. She switched her major to religion--with a minor in Russian of all things--happily haunted the stacks of the college library for four years (even better than a coat closet!), and when she graduated, had absolutely zero idea what she wanted to do with her life.

So she sat down, read all 88 Agatha Christie mystery novels in two months, took a job in a lab, got married, moved to Georgia, and spent the next six years thinking that she really should have applied to medical school after all. Then she tried PA school instead, had an early mid-life crisis, and when someone asked her what she saw herself doing in ten years, she suddenly remembered what she had known back in fifth grade: she wanted to write. She quit school, and within a few months she had landed a job as a reporter at a small-town newspaper. She spent the next eleven years working there, writing several stories each week and winning awards. But once her son was born she secretly started to write her first children's book--the story that ultimately became her debut novel, "Cheshire Moon."

Of course it wasn't that easy. It took her years to finish that first book, then four months to find a publisher. When she learned that her editor was the same man who had also edited her girlhood idol, Madeleine L'Engle, Nancy felt as if she had finally found what she was meant to do. "Cheshire Moon" was published and won the respect of members of the deaf community for its portrayal of a young deaf girl who will communicate only in Sign. This book was soon followed by the science fiction novel "The Door in the Lake," which Nancy wrote so that her son might actually be interested in reading it. (He took it to school after it was published and shared it with his friends, so she thinks she succeeded.) "Door" was an ALA Quick Pick and a Scholastic Book Club selection, and was even "translated" into the Queen's English for a British edition.

Since then Nancy spends much of her time working as a creative writing teacher and manuscript editor. Some of the people whose books she's had the privilege of shepherding into the world are Monica Roe, author of the YA novel "Thaw"; Alberto Hazan, author of the YA fantasy series "The League of Freaks"; and Jennifer Lundquist, author of the middle grade novel, "Seeing Cinderella." Nancy has also published several books for the direct-to-school education market, and is the editor of a how-to book on revision entitled "Write it Right!" by the author Sandra Asher.

Then in April 2013 she published her first book for adults: "Spontaneous Combustion: A Writer's Primer for Creative Revival." This book was inspired by the writer's malaise often suffered by her students and clients: and by her own efforts to write her way out of creative drought.

Somewhere during these years she also managed to land a spot as a contestant on the TV game show "Jeopardy" and was a one-day champion.

But writing fiction for kids continues to be her passion, and she is working hard on another middle grade novel set in a sleepy Southern town much like the one where she lives: only with more ghosts.

There is just one ghost in the 130-year-old Victorian cottage where Nancy lives and works: one humming ghost, and far too few electric outlets for the Apple laptops which are her auxiliary brain. When she's not teaching, editing, or trying to carve out time for her own writing, Nancy is an avid walker; and she also likes to grow herbs, make quilts, knit miles and miles of scarves, play the mountain dulcimer and Finnish kantele, be the Mac tech support person for everyone she knows, and tend to her slightly neurotic Newfoundland dog, Yukon.

Visit her at www.nancybutts.com, her blog http://chiralangel.blogspot.com, or her Facebook Author page www.facebook.com/chiralangel .