Story! Story! Give me story! It is for all tastes—All works of fiction that last must have good story—Curiosity is a universal passion of all ages. (Maria Edgeworth to Sir Walter Scott, 23 February 1813—discussing how her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, urged story, story, story on his daughter)
We must all have story!
Anne Therese Macdonald lives and writes in beautiful Colorado. Portions of her novel, A Short Time in Luxembourg, and her numerous published short stories can be found within this website.
Starting January 1, check Anne’s Blog for a daily running of her fourth attempt to read completly James Joyce’s Ulysses—a story she’s attempted four times—all four times stopping at page 255.
Writing In-Progress (and looking for an agent):
After the Riots
After the Riots is a generational story about lives wrapped up in the rumbling underbelly of L.A. drug history. The story is fraught with double lives, family deceit, government duplicity, tragic love, and, finally, the transformative power of friendship and courage.
“There are many ways a dysfunctional family can damage one of its own. Meg’s family had simply handed her the sin of neglect, pure, simple emotional neglect. Her father had been fifty-three when she was born. She barely knew her brothers, all three of them a generation older than she. Her mother died when Meg was three. Threes; Meg dealt her life in threes. Now, at thirty years old, she was lover-less, motherless and soon to be, father-less, and she had three deed-of-gift forms on her desk, three letters to donors, and three squishy boxes that her father had made her take from the decommissioned army depot. Beyond the office window, a whole world existed. Why had she stayed at the Stafford all these years? Why had she agreed to take these boxes?”
Rocky Road to the White House
Daniel O’Brien is broke, bored and he’s stuck in bluegrass. Once a famous punk rocker, he’s pushing sixty years old and he hates the sound of the mandolin, he hates the smell of dung-filled festival fields, and he can do without his scary bluegrass fans. When Barbara Ryan’s presidential campaign approaches Daniel to reunite his famous band and play upfront for her primary campaign, he jumps at the chance--so what if Barbara Ryan is a religious right wing governor from Wyoming; so what if she and Daniel once had an affair out their wazoo; so what if that affair broke up the best thing to happen to punk rock—Daniel can’t resist one more chance at fame and fortune:
“Curt Gowdy State Park, Wyoming, June 3; As you grow older, you fumble through day dreams of what never can be and night dreams of what once was but you didn’t understand. You think of those years of ineptitude, the years that made you what you became. And, you think of friends that could have been more, and lovers who should have been less. Parts of you die every day. The huge chunk called youth died unnoticed, dismissed, discarded bit by bit, until one day, you peer across that rodeo field, and it hits you like a brick to the head, like an asteroid flying out of control, tumbling in broken pieces toward your own helpless planet of a life...”
A Short Time in Luxembourg
Short Time in Luxembourg (Gardenia Press, 2004)
A Short Time in Luxembourg depicts a generation’s disappointments in their youthful decision-making and the resulting difficulty to control their own lives. The novel is a suspenseful exploration of the personal and career conflicts of a successful university professor, Anna Haggarty, whose husband just may have committed murder—a murder over something so petty as academic plagiarism.
“Part Elizabeth Berg…part Nora Roberts, Macdonald deftly weaves together these two genres as she follows the trials and turmoil of Dr. Anna Haggarty, a 40-something professor in a Colorado university.” Fort Collins Weekly 2004
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/mbw/
