Maggie Mooha

I think I’ve always been a storyteller. When I was still little, I used to tell my sister stories before we went to sleep. Most of them were serials – Superman and the like. It was funny how it never occurred to me until much later in life that I should try my hand at writing. \n\tMost of my career, I’ve been a music teacher. It’s funny how music is such a help when crafting a story. I actually see the structure of a book or a screenplay as if it was a musical composition. \n\tAs for the nuts and bolts of my life, I grew up in the Chicago area and was a teacher there for quite a few years. I had a chance to teach at an international school in Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, and I spent two years there. After adopting my son from Russia, we spent four years at an international school in the Philippines. During that time, I began writing. \n\tMost of my work has been screenplays, and my writing mentor is Madeline DiMaggio. I learned a great deal from her, not the least of which is what parts of my “deathless prose” or in screenplays “deathless dialogue” to toss out because they don’t contribute to the narrative. During my screenwriting days, I won a competition sponsored by a magazine in New York and was a semi-finalist at the Austen Film Festival in the Prime-Time Television Series category. I’m just telling you all of this so you don’t think I just sat down one day and wrote a novel right out of the blue. I’ve spent a lot of years working and learning. \n\tIt took me four summer vacations to write Elizabeth in the New World. I had the idea for the beginning of the book and the dénouement of the plot in my head for a while. I saw them like they were scenes from a movie. I knew I wanted to set it in a real conflict, so began searching for a conflict that involved the British that took place during Jane Austen’s lifetime. That conflict was Fedon’s Rebellion in Grenada. The rest of it was like putting a puzzle together – a puzzle that included tons of research. \nA couple of things that helped me a lot was advice I got from a self-publisher who gave an extension class at our local university. She said to write down the plot of the entire book in short scenes and put them on note cards. I did that and taped them to the two doors in my study and then just started cranking through them. The other really valuable thing she said was, “Don’t go back and read anything you wrote until the whole book is done.” She was right. You can fix the first three chapters forever if you let yourself. \nI am hoping that this is not my first and only book. I don’t know if the next one with be a sequel or something new entirely. Someone a long time ago called me “an insatiable romantic”. I hope it is still true. \n\n