Mary Anna Evans’ Life As a Writer
A few years ago, I was speaking to the Institute for Learning in Retirement in my hometown, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It was a large crowd of people who thought that retirement was great because it gave them more time to learn things. In other words, these were my kind of people.
I was asked the question, “How long have you been a writer?”
I paused a second to formulate an answer and two hands shot into the air. This was an interesting turn of events. Who were these people who wanted to answer my question for me?
As it turns out, they were my mother and my fourth-grade teacher, two people I might have expected to be attendees of the Institute for Learning in Retirement. They wanted to tell people that I’d always been a writer.
Had I? I’d certainly done other things with my life besides writing. I studied physics and engineering in college. I worked a good deal in those fields before I changed my focus to writing—spending a summer working offshore for an oil company, teaching math and physics for a couple of years right after graduate school and working as an environmental consultant at work that took me all over the country—but I do think my mother and Mrs. Kochtitzky were right.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, even when it was a fourth-grade history assignment. My affinity for writing has come in handy, even when I was working in the sciences because there is no substitute for an ability to communicate. My environmental firm’s only product was its reports. We didn’t make widgets. We gave our clients expert advice on difficult problems, and we did this in writing. A good engineer who can write well will likely have a successful career. I’ve spoken to math teachers about how to bring reading material into the classroom. I’ve even co-written articles and a book with a professor who specialized in such things.
No matter what turns my life takes, my livelihood always comes back to the written word. These days, I write novels. I work as a professor who teaches students how to write fiction and nonfiction. And I write books and articles about one of the most fascinating and successful novelists of all time, Agatha Christie. I love doing every single one of those things.
And apparently, my mother and Mrs. Kochtitzky knew I’d love it way back when I was in the fourth grade.
Justine Byrne can’t trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women’s college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers. Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn’t there to decipher German codes—she’s there to find a traitor. Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, an affluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.
Universal Link: https://books2read.com/u/4XwxG1Amazon UK:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Traitor-Beside-Her-Novel/dp/1464215588Amazon
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGYPLMTH
Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Traitor-Beside-Her-Novel/dp/1464215588
Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Traitor-Beside-Her-Novel-ebook/dp/B0BGYPLMTH
Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-traitor-beside-her-mary-anna-evans/1143344440
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-traitor-beside-her-mary-anna-evans/18743820
Audiobooks.com: https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/672506/Audible:https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Traitor-Beside-Her-Audiobook/B0BVDLCL7J
Thanks so much for hosting Mary Anna Evans today, with such a fascinating post.
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club
You’re very welcome, Cathie!