Nancy Arant Williams
First of all, I would like to thank Susan Reichert for graciously allowing me this opportunity. My name is Nancy Arant Williams, and I am both an author and book editor. But today, I want to speak to the subject of my new book release: Murder Walks on Peachtree Street. To be honest, I penned this book in the early 2000s, and even found an agent to represent it and the four that followed in this 5-book series. But because this series was not done according to the then-accepted formula format, she found no buyer for it. However, that was fine, because I was writing it for myself. (Recently, I was thrilled and excited to obtain a contract for this series with Elk Lake Publishing in Massachusetts after originally self-publishing all forty of my books.)
It was 1999, and we had just retired, moving from the only hometown I’d ever known in Nebraska, to the Missouri Ozarks, and I was at loose ends, homesick and terribly lonely. I had no network or church—even my two adult children and their families were back in Nebraska. People in Missouri have always been very nice, but they were all working two jobs, involved in their social circles, and had no room for a newcomer like me. So, from that lonely place of isolation, I asked the Lord, “What on God’s green earth did you bring me down here for? What am I supposed to do here?” And the Lord responded, “Sit down, because I’m going to teach you how to write.” Until that moment, I’d only written the occasional poem and short pieces as an expression of my personal feelings.
At that point, I told Him I thought He might have started twenty years earlier when I was younger and in better shape. (Just my opinion. Yikes—who was I to question God?) Yet in my spirit, I knew He felt I hadn’t been ready.
To be perfectly candid,
First of all, I would like to thank Susan Reichert for graciously allowing me this opportunity. My name is Nancy Arant Williams, and I am both an author and book editor. But today, I want to speak to the subject of my new book release: Murder Walks on Peachtree Street. To be honest, I penned this book in the early 2000s, and even found an agent to represent it and the four that followed in this 5-book series. But because this series was not done according to the then-accepted formula format, she found no buyer for it. However, that was fine, because I was writing it for myself. (Recently, I was thrilled and excited to obtain a contract for this series with Elk Lake Publishing in Massachusetts after originally self-publishing all forty of my books.)
It was 1999, and we had just retired, moving from the only hometown I’d ever known in Nebraska, to the Missouri Ozarks, and I was at loose ends, homesick and terribly lonely. I had no network or church—even my two adult children and their families were back in Nebraska. People in Missouri have always been very nice, but they were all working two jobs, involved in their social circles, and had no room for a newcomer like me. So, from that lonely place of isolation, I asked the Lord, “What on God’s green earth did you bring me down here for? What am I supposed to do here?” And the Lord responded, “Sit down, because I’m going to teach you how to write.” Until that moment, I’d only written the occasional poem and short pieces as an expression of my personal feelings.
At that point, I told Him I thought He might have started twenty years earlier when I was younger and in better shape. (Just my opinion. Yikes—who was I to question God?) Yet in my spirit, I knew He felt I hadn’t been ready.
To be perfectly candid,
