Spotlight Profile
October 2000
Electronic publishing may be a hot topic today, but it's yesterday's news to Marilyn Meredith, our member in the Spotlight for October.While Marilyn's first e-book could be called accidental, she liked the format so much that she stayed with it. Her e-book Kachima Spirit was a finalist for an Eppie Award, given for the first time this year by Electronically Published Internet Connection, or EPIC.
Kachima Spirit was published by Hard Shell Word Factory, and entered in the horror category--oh, wait a minute. A horror novel from a generous, nurturing person like Marilyn, whose life's work has been caring for others?
"My book really doesn't fit the horror niche," Marilyn says, "though it's full of horror. There is blood seeping through the walls, a pet is murdered as well as a best friend, horrible things happen. I think there are all sorts of horror, from Stephen King's ultimate, almost literary, very scary horror, to some just plain gory and not much of anything else, and then there's Hannibal Lector."
She goes on to say about Kachima Spirit: "There is a romance but not enough to fit it into romantic suspense, and far too much horror for many of the other markets--there is a mystery, but it's entwined with many ghosts...I've always read mystery and horror--my favorites because good always wins over evil."
Marilyn and her husband Arnold--known as Hap to their friends--met on a blind date 49 years ago. "He was a cute sailor from Port Hueneme and I was a high school senior in Eagle Rock," she recalls. "Three of my friends met me with their dates, also servicemen, and we all took the streetcar to Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles, where we ate, danced and got acquainted.
"We took a taxi back to one girl's home, where someone was to come and drive me home--about three miles away. When it got late, we decided to walk home. It never occurred to me to call my folks. We got home about three A.M. My parents were wild. I asked if Hap could spend the night, since he had no transportation. They let him stay on the couch in the den."
A few weeks later, Marilyn and Hap were married. Now retired, they live on the Tule River in Central California's Sierra foothills.
Marilyn makes good use of California locations in her books. Kachima Spiritis set in Ojai. Lingering Spirit, an e-book from The Fiction Works, is set in a fictional beach town much like Oxnard. Guilt by Association from Mountain View Publishing is set in a fictional town, based on a real town north of where Marilyn lives. Here are the opening lines:
Despite the yellow rain hat and slicker Leslie York wore over her uniform, water dripped down the back of her neck as soon as she stepped from her white sheriff's Bronco.
Wasn't it ever going to stop raining?
She'd thought she'd go home early--if you could call midnight early. The weather had driven most of the residents of the old gold-mining town of Copper Creek indoors. She hadn't passed a single car going either direction on the road that led higher into the mountains, or the highway that wound around in a southerly direction to the county seat of Manzanita or east toward Sequoia National Park.
But the dispatcher had ruined that plan by calling for Leslie to investigate reported gunfire at the intersection of the main artery through town and Orchard Road, a remote area on the way towards the higher elevations of the Sierra.
It probably wasn't anything; the folks in Copper Creek fired guns at marauding wild animals, rattlesnakes, and quite often, just for the fun of it. Sometimes it seemed as though the town had remained in a time long past; even the retirees from southern California dressed and acted like they lived in the wild west.
----Marilyn Meredith, Guilt by Association
