Note
from Suz: Today's contribution to the countdown comes, once again,
from my husband Ed.Note
from Suz: Today's contribution to the countdown comes, once again,
from my husband Ed.
The Sort-of Unauthorized Biography of Suz
By her husband, Ed
Suz asked me to write a couple of entries for the Countdown to FLASHPOINT, and after I finished the Story of Gordo, it occurred to me that people who are checking in here, day after day, might be a little interested in Suz herself. Where did she come from? What kind of child grows up to be the author of books about guys who go running into the cold ocean, roll around in the sand, put paint on their faces and then blow things up?
She was born in a small log cabin in New Jersey, in 1960.
Well, all right. Not a small log cabin. A hospital.
Her parents were English teachers (ah ha -- a clue!) and were living in the town of Pearl River, New York at the time.
(Eerie aside: A few years before Suz was born, her dad was in the army, and was in the same boot camp as one of my uncles. After they got out of the service, they both unknowingly moved to the same town in New York -- Pearl River. In fact, my uncle lived just several streets over from Suz and her family, and my family visited many times, but our paths never crossed.)
Anyway, Suz was a quiet student, and generally pretty shy, until her third grade teacher heard her singing in the playground. She encouraged Suz to sing in front of others (like on a stage), and that, ladies and gentlemen, was what you might call a Big Moment in Suz’s life.
From that time on, Suz looked for ways to perform. For example, with her older sister, Carolee, using an acting troupe of four people between the ages of 9 and 11, Suz mounted a production of "H.M.S. Pinafore" in their backyard. (Suz played about 6 lead roles, including Ralph. Reviews were favorable.)
During elementary school, Suz’s family moved to Guilford, where her father became the superintendent of schools. Middle school, often a time of terrible awkwardness and adjustment, was blissful for Suz, because the Guilford Middle School was using an experimental curriculum, based on individual student progress. Suz’s strategy was to find out what her daily assignment was, finish it in the first half hour of class in a blaze of intensity, and then spend the rest of the day playing chess and reading.
She got good at both.
Around this time, Suz saw The Sting and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.
Paul Newman. A Very Big Moment.
High school at Guilford for Suz was dominated by the arts. Among the highlights were her choral music teacher, who inspired her to excellence in far more than just singing, and her close friendships with the creative people who haunted the school’s theatre program. Suz acted, sang and danced right through junior year, when her dad got another job -- Superintendent of Schools in Farmingdale, New York. So Suz had to spend her senior year in a different high school.
That was tough.
But Suz took it as an opportunity to blast into a new group of people as the mystery woman. ("Have you seen the new girl? What’s her story?") And in a class about TV and film production, Suz met a really funny, talented kid, who was obviously the most interesting person in the class. That was our friend, Eric Ruben.
Another Big Moment. Suz and Eric became great friends, and are to this day. (Ask Eric who gave Suz the idea to write about SEALs. Go ahead. Just ask.)
College. Boston University, School of Communication. Suz figured she’d be in show business, television, movies, something. And she also wanted to be a rock and roll star, so in her second year of school, she put up a sign at Berklee College of Music, announcing that she was going to form the next big band out of Boston. (The Cars had just been discovered. Suz liked that idea.) The first person to call her was my former college roommate. Big Moment again. He was a terrific guitar player, and the first person in her new band, named Fazzone (later changed to Sensible Shoes). That’s around the time I met Suz.
A few years later, we became engaged. (I’m not going to bother listing the Big Moments any more. They’re going to be pretty obvious from here on.) I finished law school, the band broke up, Suz and I got married, and moved to Phoenix. Why? Because we’d grown up in the northeast and had never lived anywhere else and figured that was a good time to try something new.
And as long as were trying new things, we started a family. (Hello Melanie. Wow, you’re really cute when you’re awake, but you don’t sleep too well, do you?)
A year and a half later we moved back east, and Jason was born. He was cute too, but a better sleeper than Mel. (That’s important -- we weren’t sure we were going to be able to handle never sleeping.)
But around that time, Suz began to seek outlets for her creativity other than developing recipes for kids that were allergic to just about everything. So she joined a community chorus. And then formed a smaller, a cappella chorus to sing Christmas carols at nursing homes. And then formed an even smaller a cappella group to perform at weddings, and clubs.
One day, Suz found a Star Trek story she had written (and in which she had played a starring role), in long hand, in pencil, over the endless months of an incredibly uninspiring chemistry course in high school. To preserve it, she started to type it into our brand new Leading Edge personal computer.
Soon, she stopped bothering to look at the old version of the book as she was typing, and a few weeks later, her first Star Trek novel was complete.
She liked it so much that she wrote several more.
She also started to write televisions scripts and screenplays. A Hollywood agent told her that she was good, but that she’d need to move to LA to get paid for her work. Suz looked over at her toddlers, wondered how I was going to commute from LA to New York, and decided that she’d try a different way to get Hollywood to notice her.
She decided to get published.
So after some research (including sending me to the store to buy about 50 romances -- I still wonder what the bookstore clerk thought of me when I came to the counter with an armload of Harlequin and Silhouette titles), she set out to write a romance.
About fifteen pages into her first manuscript, she knew she’d found the right outlet for her creative voice. (Yeah. Momento Grande. I couldn’t resist.)
Six months after she typed her first sentence, she got the call. She was going to be a published author.
And the rest, is, well, recent history.
That's all for now! Be sure to come back for tomorrow's installment in the Countdown to FLASHPOINT!
See you tomorrow!