10 Things You Didn’t Know About Sandy Nathan
I’m not a well-known author, so you probably don’t know much of anything about me. I’ll fill in the blanks.
1. I am old. This may seem like a suicidal thing to say in an industry that considers authors kaput at thirty-five. I’m pushing seventy. I’m supremely happy and comfortable in my skin, more than I’ve ever been. I couldn’t write what I do when I was younger. I didn’t have the depth of understanding or the ability to immerse myself in a story. I for sure didn’t have the writing skills. I’ve spent about eighteen years in two writing groups and being coached/mentored by my editor. My creative mind is as sharp as ever, though my short-term memory is a bit wonky. (Who did you say you were?) And––I just got a new horse, a gorgeous gray Peruvian Paso mare. We’re in love. So don’t fear aging, it’s not so bad.
2. I was born in San Francisco and lived either there or on the San Francisco Peninsula most of my life. That area came to be known as Silicon Valley. My dad was the President and CEO of what was the 9th largest residential construction company in the United States in its heyday. I know what powerful, successful men and women are like, and I know their energy. I also know how social systems work in very prosperous places. They’re brutal. This knowledge is most relevant for my Bloodsong Series, which takes place in the late 1990s to the contemporary era, but it’s also relevant for the Earth’s End Series. The economically segmented world, in which Jeremy Edgarton and his friends live in (in The Angel & the Brown-Eyed Boy) is drawn from my childhood.
3. I lived in a golden bubble of prosperity until I was eighteen years old. When a drunk driver ran into my father’s car head on, my wonderful life was ripped from me. My dad was horribly maimed and died after three days of agony. I went from a golden princess to someone living close to poverty level. Boy, was that ever a character-building experience. I developed myself as a result and learned to stand on my own feet. I’m very different than I would have been had my dad lived, but I do miss the bubble sometimes.
4. I went to school a lot. I love learning and it was part of my salvation after my father was killed. I’ve got an MS in Economics and an MA in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling. (I was doing a career change.) I also spent a year at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in their PhD program. This convinced me that I did not want a PhD in Economics, but it opened the door to a twenty-year gig coaching negotiations for one of the professors. I loved this: just me, a video camera, and two MBA (Master’s in Business Administration) students in a small room. There, I bludgeoned them into being able to listen non-judgmentally. The skill probably lasted two minutes after they walked out of the room, but I consider it my contribution to making the world a better place.
5. I have worked a lot. I’ve worked three gigs as an economist. I was project economist on two studies—one a year long and the other a year and a half. The studies were managed by the Planning Department of Santa Clara County (southern part of Silicon Valley). The second one was a big deal, funded by the National Science Foundation and jointly conducted by the SCC and the RAND Corporation. I got to play with the really bright boys there. Later, I was the Economic Analyst for Santa Clara County. I gave it all up to get my MA in counseling––and to be a mom. I had my two daughters right about then. I’ve done other stuff, too. We owned a furniture store. I went back to school (again) and studied interior design. I worked as the principle designer in our store for ten years. Out of the blue, our family was consumed by a horse addiction. We were all smitten by Peruvian Paso horses and ended up breeding them for twenty years before retiring. So, be glad if you’re old and not lazy, you can cover a lot of ground.
6. I had my first visionary experience as a young teenager, riding my horse through the redwood groves of the Coastal Range down the spine of the San Francisco Peninsula. Much later, getting my MA in counseling, I learned it was a “unitive experience.” The redwoods with their motes of light and the soft dust of the trail, the gurgling brook surrounded by ferns, my warm horse with his gentle breathing, and I merged. I couldn’t tell one from the other. It was a glimpse of the way the world should be, or could be. Peaceful. Ecstatic. Sacred. I’ve had those experiences ever since, usually when something rotten happens.
7. Because of the tendency for tragic and traumatic events to throw me into ecstatic states that turn into books, I say that I write “literature through disaster.” The Earth’s End Series came to me after a transcendent experience following my brother’s death. You can read more about it the Author’s Note at the front of the book. Something even worse produced the Bloodsong Series. (It’s in the Author’s Note of that series, as well.) These glimpses of the divine that give me my books punch a hole in the universe and allow me access to higher realms of being. The hole stays open after I’ve spit the initial book out. With Earth’s End, I wrote The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy at warp speed. When I was done, Lady Grace & the War of a New World was there. When I was done with The Lady, pop! The Headman & the Assassin flowed in. The way I get my books is through a gestalt of meaning, I don’t have trouble finishing them. Whereas before the experience of creating the Bloodsong Series, I couldn’t finish a limerick to save my life; afterward, I finish pretty near everything, eventually.
8. I’ve always written, whether academically or professionally. I thought I was a good writer. I was, for those fields. That means nothing in terms of writing publishable fiction. So I participated in two writing groups and worked with my editor, turning into a pretty good writer. I’m tougher on myself than anyone else is, which is a good thing. Clean up those participles! Sponge those redundant phrases!
9. My primary purpose in writing is to raise my readers to that higher plane I touch every so often. Do I want to change the world? You bet. Do I want to save the world? If it’s possible. No matter how grim, grisly, violent, bloody, sexy, or beautiful my writing is, every word is there for one reason: to wake people up and get them to think. To inspire them. Life is so short and transitory; we need to savor every minute. As my father’s death showed me, everything can be gone in a moment.
10. You don’t have to know all this stuff about me to read my books, but it will fill in the blanks and give you an indication of what shaped my words.
I hope you’re moved to read my work and I hope you find it valuable if you do. Thanks so much for walking this way with me. It’s been a privilege to share my life with you.
Tomorrow morning at 7:35 AM, a nuclear holocaust will destroy the planet. Two people carry the keys to survival: Jeremy Edgarton, a 16-year-old, tech genius and revolutionary; and Eliana, the angelic, off-world traveler sent to Earth on a mission to prevent her planet's death.
Welcome to a future world only heartbeats from our own.
By the late 22nd century, the Great Recession of the early 2000s has lead to a worldwide police state. A ruined United States barely functions. Government control masks chaos, dissenters are sent to camps, and technology is outlawed. War rages while the authorities proclaim the Great Peace.
It's New York City on the eve of nuclear Armageddon.
Join Eliana & Jeremy as they begin a quest to save two doomed planets . . . and find each other.
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When the earth blows up at the end of The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy (Earth's End 1) that was it, right? The characters go off in all directions, nevermore to be seen.
Not exactly. In Lady Grace, a few survivors of the nuclear holocaust make their way back to Piermont Manor, Jeremy Edgarton's ancestral estate. The radiation is gone and it's finally safe to go home.
What awaits them makes their worst dreams look like Bollywood frolics. Right away, they find out that evolution can work for evil as well as good. Going home requires a battle more deadly than any they've fought.
The returning characters appear from everywhere, in ways you'd never believe. Some of them you've met before; some are new to Tales from Earth's End.
Bud Creeman and Wesley Silverhorse, characters from author Sandy Nathan's novel, Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money, drop in from the year 2015, thousands of years before the time of Lady Grace. Bud and Wes provide needed Native American skills and spiritual power.
Shining through it all is Lady Grace, a phoenix rising from the devastation of her civilization, unrecognizable as the person she once was.
It was a new world,
but was it one that permitted love?
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HE KNEW HER WORK WAS MURDER Sam Baahuhd has been the village headman for twenty-two years. Like all the headmen in surrounding villages, he has powers. But Sam's powers are greater than any headman's, anywhere, ever. He controls others with his speech and heals with a touch. Even with what he can do, Sam has survived only because he's kept his fellow villagers from murdering him. They're a gang of thugs who spend most of their time drunk or stoned. Sam and the villagers live on Veronica Edgarton's estate. Or they do until nuclear Armageddon forces them into a huge underground bomb shelter. When Sam carries a naked stranger into the shelter, he knows what she did before the war. Her work was murder--murdering people.
She tortured people until they broke, or died. She was a federal agent in a police state. Nuclear radiation traps Sam and Emily and the rest of the village's residents in an echoing cement cavern three hundred feet beneath the earth's surface. There is no escape from the underground. Not for them. Or their children, or their children's children . . . Sam has no idea Emily will ignite his heart and change his world. The lovely outsider carries deadly secrets. Only Sam with his village headman's power can heal her. Only Emily can make Sam the man he was meant to be. Passion explodes between them. Passion that brings joy and pain, ecstasy and remorse. Passion that can kill. Join Sam & Emily for a legendary love story you'll never forget.
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Genre – Metaphysical Science Fiction
Rating – R
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