BOOKS MENTIONED:
- Horizon - Infinity - Good Morning, Midnight - Sirens Visit Tabitha at http://TabithaLordAuthor.com Support Project 3.8: http://www.3point8.org
FULL TRANSCRIPT
C. G. Cooper: Welcome to Books in 30 with me, C. G.Cooper. Here at Books in 30, we discuss great books with some of today's top authors. Welcome to our listeners and a big Books in 30 welcome to today's guest, Tabitha Lord. Tabitha lives in Rhode Island, a few towns away from where she grew up. She's married, has four kids, two spoiled cats, and a lovable black lab. The house is noisy and the dinner table full. She holds a degree in classics from College of Holy Cross and taught Latin for years at an independent Waldorf school where she now serves on the Board of Trustees. Her debut novel Horizon won the Writer's Digest grand prize for self-published fiction in 2016 and was named a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the Indie Excellence Awards. The sequel, Infinity, was released in June 2017. She also has short fiction published and soon to be published through World Weaver Press, Grimbold Books, and Belanger Books. Welcome, Tabitha. How are you doing today? Tabitha Lord: Great, thanks for having me. C. G. Cooper: Yeah. Well I read your bio. I know that's not everything about you, so would you like to give us a little more about who you are and how you became a writer? Tabitha Lord: Well, yeah, it's an interesting path. I'm one of those people who, when they say, people ask "How long have you been writing?" I say, "Well, since forever, you know since I could hold a pencil." But I never thought that I could complete a full length novel. That was always sort of the stumbling block. I had a completely different career teaching and as the admissions' director in a small school. Before that I thought I wanted to be a doctor and I actually went to medical school for a while and dropped out because I had too many children, like Old Mother Hubbard, you know. I've had this really interesting happy career and as my kids got older I started thinking do I want to go back to medical school, is that a thing or has that ship sailed? The only thing that got me as excited as medicine was writing. Again the stumbling block was sort of creating the full length novel. Tabitha Lord: The last project I did at the school I was working at was lead us through the accreditation. Anybody that's ever done an accreditation knows it's a two year process. You're writing this document, that I affectionately called my thesis. I did the document on behalf of the school, so I did all the single voice writing and all of the compiling of different data points and that sort of thing. While I was doing that, it was about a nine month project, I said "Wow you're in this habit of writing every day why don't you try writing something else in the evenings." Tabitha Lord: So I started the draft of my first book and at the end of nine months, which I find as a mom kind of telling, I birthed this science-fiction novel. Of course, it was terrible in its initial form, but I had gotten over that stumbling block of "can you write a book?" So, I pretty much just dumped my whole heart and soul into turning writing into a career. I've had some interesting projects along the way. I write for a site called Book Club Babble (BookClubBabble.com). I think it's a little bit similar to what you're doing here except we actually do review and post about books. We don't criticize, but we promote. I've gotten to meet some great authors, so that's a wonderful piece of my career. Tabitha Lord: I write short fiction as well that I've sold to a few places. I guest-post for Writer's Digest and Writer Unboxed and some other blogs. I blog myself and I've worked on a really cool nonfiction project last year called Project 3.8 working with families with children with cancer where I was profiling the families. That was about a six month assignment. So it's been an adventure. C. G. Cooper: You have had an eclectic career haven't you? Tabitha Lord: Yes, I have. I really have. C. G. Cooper: Project 3.8, tell me a little bit more about that. That's fascinating. Tabitha Lord: Yeah, it was an amazing thing. I have a very good friend who's a photographer and she took a picture of a little boy that had cancer, and he was wearing a set of boxing gloves. His name was Dorian. The hashtag Dstrong (#DStrong) went viral all over the world of this little boy in the boxing gloves. It was his wish that before he passed that he would be famous in China, that was his child dream. It spread all over the world. There's actually pictures of people spelling out #DStrong on the Great Wall of China. Then when he did pass, my friend who had taken that photograph was friends with his mom, said "You know there's got to be more. There's got to be more that we can do to bring light to this pediatric cancer plague," basically. Tabitha Lord: She started a project where she was going to photograph 20 more children in the state of Rhode Island that were either in some phase of their cancer life. Basically, they're just recently diagnosed, in the middle of treatment, or some months out. Twenty families were a part of the project and about two months into it, she asked me if I would do the writing piece for her and interview the families and create profiles for everyone. We did that together. It was an amazing experience to go right into the homes of these families and have them open their doors and they're in the midst of probably the most difficult time they'll ever face. You know, watching their child suffer and struggle. Yet ... I still talk to some of them and we're still ... They're just amazing people and these kids are amazing. Tabitha Lord: The reasons it's titled 3.8 is because only 3.8 percent of all federal monies for cancer research goes into pediatric research. While it's considered relatively rare in the grand scheme of all the cancers in the world, the amount of impact that it has is so huge that we really all just feel like 3.8 percent is just negligible and ridiculous. We had to bring awareness as best we could, so we did a bunch of gallery openings with the photographs and with the written pieces. We had a website and a blog and they were featured all over the place. We ran it for several months and I think did some really good work. C. G. Cooper: That is fantastic and I'll bet it was probably comforting for the families as well. I mean I know when you're going through something like that it's tough to talk about but it's probably also therapeutic to talk about it. Tabitha Lord: Yes. C. G. Cooper: I mean, you must have felt like you weren't just taking something way, you were able to give something back to these families in that horrible situation. Tabitha Lord: They really wanted their stories told. They really wanted them told on behalf of their children. The thing is that when you're so deeply into it you can't step back and do that yourself, but Robin and I who don't have children with cancer or with illnesses like that, could kind of be the observer coming in and have the wherewithal to walk away and do the work behind getting this out to the world in a way that can be received. I think these families are just in too fragile a position and too emotionally taxed right now to be able to do that. Some of them I'm sure will come back later and be able to tell their stories, but while they were in the midst of it you almost needed two people who were observers to be able to tell the story and that's what we did. C. G. Cooper: Wow, well thank you for doing that. This is a perfect example, you know you do your own show, and one of the reasons I love this show is because I find out stuff like that. You know the general questions I'm going to ask, but I have no idea what your answers are going to be. Tabitha Lord: Right, what direction you could go. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, I could talk to you for six hours about just Project 3.8, so we'll save that for another time. Tabitha Lord: Okay. C. G. Cooper: Let's jump into books, because that's definitely what listeners want to hear about. Tabitha Lord: Sure. C. G. Cooper: What are you reading right now, or what's something that you just finished recently that blew you away? Tabitha Lord: Alright, so I do read for that site called Book Club Babble, and I have the pleasure of being able to sort of pick and choose what I get to read. I'll often say yes to things I don't know much about because I want to broaden my own reading experience. You tend to read the things you really like, I'll read military fiction until I, you know, or whatever, but I enjoy a good literary novel sometimes, or I enjoy a women's novel or something like that. So I will accept books that just look good based on the story. Tabitha Lord: I got sent an arc several months ago now at this point, the book's been out for a while, and it was a book by a woman called Lily Brooks-Dalton, and the title of the book is Good Morning, Midnight. I just said yes to it, I said "Ah that looks like kind of a neat cover and interesting premise." I really fell in love with it. I would say it sticks in my mind, I loved it so much that I had my actual book club in the neighborhood, that I actually belong to, read it. They really enjoyed it and we had a great discussion about it. I know that it has mixed reviews because it's a literary sci-fi, if you can imagine. C. G. Cooper: Really? Tabitha Lord: It's a kind of paradoxical, but you know the premise is, it's speculative so it's set just in the sort of the near future, the sort of familiar future. It's not dystopian or anything. There's a team of astronauts that are on a Jupiter mission, so they're able to travel into our galaxy a little bit further. It's a long mission, so it has all this honest, you know, we've been on a spaceship for 18 months together and that kind of thing. It's a tight knit crew. Meanwhile, back on earth there's an old aging scientist who's up in the arctic circle studying radio transmissions, etc. All of a sudden, that outpost is evacuated, and the people on their mission lose all contact with planet earth. You actually never know why, you know, what has actually happened on earth that this man is stranded in the arctic circle by himself, and these guys are stuck in space not knowing what they're coming home to. Tabitha Lord: It's a really interesting psychological sort of investigation of what happens when you actually think you're the last people alive, the last of your species almost. I just really really enjoyed it for that premise and that question, that existential question. I find, and her writing was so beautiful. It was very literary writing, and I think the complaints about it were that it wasn't, the plot wasn't as "science fiction-y" as some people like 'cause it is billed as a sci-fi. I thought it was really elegant and something really different that I hadn't really read before. C. G. Cooper: That's very cool. That was something out of the blue that you got, that wasn't something that you were looking for? Tabitha Lord: Yup, nope, it just came to me, somebody asked me "Hey, could we send this?" and I said "Sure, that sounds good. I'll give it a look." I actually did an interview with the author, a written interview with the author, and it was really fun to get inside her mind too. C. G. Cooper: Awesome. So that was called Good Morning, Midnight? Is that right? Tabitha Lord: Good Morning, Midnight, yup. Lily Brooks-Dalton. I believe this is her fiction debut too. She had written something nonfiction before this, but she's a pretty, you know, pretty much a debut fiction writer. C. G. Cooper: Got it. Well, very cool. Let's move onto the next question. The loaded question for all authors. Tabitha Lord: Oh my God, no! C. G. Cooper: Yeah. What is your favorite book of all time? Tabitha Lord: Okay, I have to say two because they're two completely different things. If I really had to pick, I don't know if I could. It's funny because I read them all. I read these books ... I don't reread, I'm not a re-reader. There's so many good books out in the world I just can't bring myself to go back to something and read it again because I feel like I'm missing out on the new thing. The Stand by Stephen King is one of my all time ... I just, you know, is it the most fabulously written book in the world? No. Is it the scariest? No. There was just something epic about it and in its apocalyptic grandeur that I have thought about from the moment I read it and it's stayed with me ever since. I have gone back and I have read the unabridged edition that he re-released years later. Every once in a while I go back and just say wow, you know. It's, of course, dated at this point, time-wise. It's still, it's terrifying in its creepy apocalyptic whatever. Tabitha Lord: So that's on my list. I don't read a lot of horror any more, that's one genre that I ... I'm dabbling with a little bit of writing in horror but I don't read too much of it, 'cause the darkness stuck in my head is not really where I want to go. That one is just a darn good book. If you remember it all these years later, I have to put it on that list. Tabitha Lord: The other one would be East of Eden. I'm not a huge Steinbeck fan. I read some of his other stuff and I go "Oh God, shoot, stick pins in my eyes." It's so depressing, you know, but that is such a great story. It's such, you know, the Cain and Abel paradigm retold and with such beautiful writing. That was one of the books that I remember reading a long time ago and then rereading a couple of times since, so I said you can be both a good story teller and a great writer. Isn't that the goal? C. G. Cooper: Is that the only Steinbeck that you've read? Tabitha Lord: No, I've read most of them and I just don't love any of the others. I find that the subject matter, I mean I recognize them as the great fiction novels that they are, novellas, but I don't enjoy them. But I really enjoyed East of Eden and didn't want it to end and have gone back to it several times. C. G. Cooper: Awesome. So, you have reread one? Tabitha Lord: Yup, those are the only two and that's why they get on this list. They're the only ones that I ever really go back and reread. C. G. Cooper: That's a very good test. How many, I'm curious now, how many books do you think you read a month or per year? Tabitha Lord: Oh gosh, I probably read between two and four books a month because I have to do that to put out content for Book Club Babble. I'm not keeping up well with my actual book clubs, of which I belong to two, so often if I'm hosting the book club, I will have them read one of the books I'm reading for Book Club Babble, so kind of economy of the soul. Yeah, I would say between two and four books a month. C. G. Cooper: Okay. Alright. Good. I'm always curious to hear how much people read because obviously the listeners of the show read a lot. I mean I've talked to some people who read multiple books a day and that just blows me away. Tabitha Lord: That's crazy. For me, two to four a month is about all I physically have time for between the writing stuff that I have to do and this line up of crazy deadlines and things that I'm sure, we've got the same ones, to be able to squeeze in the reading time. I love to read and I feel like, as a writer, I have to keep reading so that my mind stays fresh and I'm learning all the time from other writers. But, yeah, it's becoming more challenging. I used to be able to for sure read a book a week and I would have piles of books from the library, but the more that I'm writing the less time I have for reading. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, something happened to me when I really got going full-time that I had a hard time reading fiction. I can read nonfiction all day, especially business stuff or craft stuff, but I had to go to audiobooks for fiction because now I can just listen in the car or while I'm going for a run or going for a walk, and it's like it almost forces me but also lets me kind of tune out and get something while I'm doing something that I usually wouldn't accomplish anything except maybe some exercise. I feel it. I used to read a lot more physically, but now it's thank you Audible, make it so much easier for me. Tabitha Lord: Yeah, I'm going to start shifting over to Audible too for my reading for pleasure. Not that the Book Club Babble books and all these books aren't for pleasure, they certainly are, but they're also now they've become part of the job. There are some books I want to pick up just by my favorite authors. When they release a new book, that I'm like I want to read that one, but when will I squeeze it in? I'm really working on getting myself into the Audible habit. C. G. Cooper: Well good. I know I listen, I've ramped up, I think it's 2 to 2 1/4 times listening speed, so I really squeeze in a lot of reading now. You've got what, four kids, and I've got three, so we definitely have some driving time that we can use. Tabitha Lord: We definitely do. C. G. Cooper: Well, good. Let's move onto your work. Did you bring a snippet that you can read for the listeners? Tabitha Lord: I do. I have a snippet. I'll just read a little bit from the beginning of my book, my debut novel Horizon of which the second book in the series released this summer. I think you mentioned that earlier. The premise, when I'm at Comic-Con or I'm doing a signing and people are always like "What's your book about?" The first Comic-Con I went to my son was my table buddy and I was signing and selling the whole weekend. I went off on this rambling explanation of the book and when I finished my son was like "Oh, Mom you have to do better. I saw their eyes glazing over." I'm like oh, no, he's right. I hadn't pitched it in so long, because once you go into production of it and you're in your editing and you've written your blurb, you don't really think about that piece anymore, in the same way as when you were pitching and writing your blurb. So I kind of lost the plot a little bit and couldn't talk about it so well. But now I'm back in practice. Tabitha Lord: I would say there's a premise for me of: What if on a distant world there was a small population and some of the population evolved differently from their neighbors and could do things with their minds that their neighbors couldn't, like read minds or heal? How would that impact the fabric of the society? Of course, it doesn't go well, and the "cannots / have-nots" are threatened by their neighbors and so they stage an invasion, and a near genocide. My protagonist is a survivor of that. When we meet her, she's alone and on the run. She witnesses a spaceship crash near her camp and that pulls her into this greater intrigue of realizing that her world was once a colony and they'd been isolated for so long. Then now she's pulled back into the drama of the greater galaxy, I guess you'd say. It's a traditional space opera; in that sense, it's intended to be a trilogy. I will just read a little piece of chapter one. C. G. Cooper: Awesome. Tabitha Lord: Alright. "She felt them before she heard them. The sudden wave of panic gripped Caeli so fiercely that she fell to her knees. Sweat beaded on her forehead and her body shook with another person's cold fear. "We're losing altitude. I can't keep the nose up. Time is running out." A voice echoed in her head, frantic. The words were strange and foreign, but she felt their intent. Tabitha Lord: A ship pierced the white clouds overhead. Frozen in place, Caeli tracked it streaking across the sky. Her consciousness now fully merged with one of the desperate occupants onboard. Her breath came in short gasping bursts. Seconds later, a shattering pain exploded through her body and she screamed. The ground shook violently beneath her and then nothing. She collapsed onto the ground barely conscious, her body spent and her mind blank. For a few silent moments, she lay empty and still. Tabitha Lord: Her sense of smell returned first. She inhaled the earthiness of decaying leaves and the tangy scent of sea water in the distance. Familiar things. She'd fallen face down with her pack on the ground next to her, bursts of red berries scattered over gray-brown dirt. Her memory crept back in fragments. She'd been gathering fruit and exploring this section of the forest. The ship. The crash. Her eyes flew open, and she sat up trembling. Reaching her mind out, she searched for any trace of life. There it was, nudging against her consciousness like a persistent but incoherent whisper, and it was fading quickly. Whoever was in that ship wasn't going to live much longer." Tabitha Lord: There you go. C. G. Cooper: Awesome. Now what, I won't ask what happens next. Tabitha Lord: What happens next? Good. Good. C. G. Cooper: What was the inspiration for that book? Tabitha Lord: Well you know people ask me that all the time and I have to say, I've marinated in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica. As a child that's been my whole ... So where my mind goes when I'm writing, right now at least, is certainly speculative fiction and sci-fi. I had this image of, like I had this scene playing over and over in my head, that very scene, of a girl feeling somebody nearby and a spaceship crashing near her and her having some kind of skill to be able to save this pilot. It was just like a kind of a freeform that would be interesting, what an interesting premise. Then I also had this sort of separate idea of what would happen if on a distant planet part of the population evolved differently and could do things? What would that do? What would that look like? Then I thought, well, maybe I'll make her one, and I married the two ideas and I just started thinking about that plot. That's, yeah, it's been spiraling around for years. C. G. Cooper: That's awesome. Isn't it funny how that picture pops into your head and you can't get it out? I know that happened with my very first novel and it got to the point where it was almost like a headache and I had to get it out on paper. Is that how you felt? Tabitha Lord: Oh yeah. It's just like it starts to swirl and swirl and swirl and itch away and kind of dig away at you until you start to tell the story. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, well awesome. Okay, so that's Horizon by Tabitha Lord. Check it out, make sure, so you can find out what happens after the first chapter. Now, let's move onto, I know you're excited about this because most authors are, mean reviews. Did you bring a couple mean reviews with you? Tabitha Lord: Okay, I have a great mean review from Goodreads. I swear Goodreads is just so awful, they're not, I mean I love Goodreads in so many ways, and I have some great reviews on Goodreads, but I also have this. Okay, so now I just read the beginning so I don't think my book is this, but hey, you know what, it's her opinion. She wrote "This book is about as exciting as a bowl of plain tepid oatmeal. Seriously. The book is a snooze-fest." I thought wow, alright, she really didn't like it. Then there's a couple of others on here but they're just sort of generic "We hated it" "It was terrible" but there was one and I can't find it and I really searched because I was like "where is that review?" I know it was on Goodreads, and it was buried somewhere in here but I swear I've looked through everyone and I can't find it. Someone was making fun of my naming conventions in the book and was talking about how everyone sounded like a Disney princess. Tabitha Lord: I'm like well for Caeli's name, the way I have it spelled is Latin for "sky." It means sky. It's the genitive singular, so it's a declined noun in Latin. I'm a classics major so I really did this right. I'm like I'm pretty sure there's no Disney princess named that. Then the planets you know I look up on star charts and I actually find real stars and real planets. I'm just like wow, fan fiction with Disney princesses, that like a stretch with my book. I really tried to find that review and I can't find it, so maybe it got pulled down, I don't know. Those are my fun favorites, bowl of tepid plain oatmeal and Disney princesses. C. G. Cooper: Fan fiction with Disney princesses. I know I haven't gotten that one in my reviews, thank goodness. I mean, I love Disney princesses, but I don't think mine could be- Tabitha Lord: Yeah, me too. C. G. Cooper: That's interesting. Tabitha Lord: In space? Alright, sure, there's I guess princesses in space, I guess. C. G. Cooper: Maybe you should talk to Disney and get that into a show or movie. Tabitha Lord: Get an option. C. G. Cooper: There you go. Somebody believes in it. Well, cool. Let's move onto the speed round, if you're cool with that. Tabitha Lord: Okay. C. G. Cooper: I've got four questions. We've got some time, so you can stretch these out a little bit, if you'd like. We'd like to know, number one, what's your favorite thing about being an author? Tabitha Lord: Wow, I like telling stories it turns out. I like the freedom of this lifestyle that I have now, of really being able to write until midnight if I feel like it. It's just a different flexible world that I live in now. Mostly, I like the telling of stories. That's the best part I think. C. G. Cooper: Cool. Alright, number two, what is the best advice you ever received? Another loaded question. Tabitha Lord: Well, so I guess it would be, I mean writing advice? I'm assuming you mean writing advice. C. G. Cooper: No actually, life advice, it doesn't matter. Tabitha Lord: Alright. How about if I give one piece of writing advice and one piece of life advice? C. G. Cooper: Totally. Tabitha Lord: Okay, so a college professor my freshman year of college said to us, and I remember feeling slightly offended by this at the time because I didn't realize how wise it was. She said "When you decide what it is you people want to do with your lives, and it may change over time," she said "choose something that you love and are passionate about of course, and also choose something you're good at." Now we grow up, our generation grew up hearing you can be anything you want to be, and you want to love what you do, it's not going to be ... You know, and I thought ... All these years later it's always going to be work. No matter how passionate you are about something, it's always going to be work. I think it's good to do something that resonates and that matches, suits your temperament and suits your skill set. That magic combination of "you love it AND you're good at it" was really a good piece of advice and I pass that on. C. G. Cooper: Awesome. Yeah, I feel like I'm hearing that more and more recently. Like it's not just about passion and what you love, it's also about what you might have a talent for and how hard you work at it. I love that message. Isn't it funny how you couldn't internalize that when you were that young? I know I couldn't either. Tabitha Lord: No I couldn't. I was offended. To say, what am I good at. I could be good at anything if I just work hard enough at it. Well, no actually I'll never be an astrophysicist, no matter how hard I work at it. Even though I love many things about science, it's just not my natural aptitude. That was really good advice. I have a good piece of dating advice. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, tell us. Tabitha Lord: This is dating advice I give my children, and one of them is an adult, two are adults now actually. One's in college, one's out of college, and then I have two teenagers. I tell them, well I actually use the F bomb, but I'm not going to do it on the air. C. G. Cooper: What! You use the F bomb with your kids? Tabitha Lord: I did. I said, “don't date anyone more ___ upped than you.” That's my advice. I think it's pretty good advice. People are not projects. C. G. Cooper: I wish somebody had told me that when I was 12. Tabitha Lord: Don't you, though? C. G. Cooper: Absolutely. God. Tabitha Lord: That's why I didn't mince words for them. They seem to have taken me up on it and the few that have had little misadventures with dating and have had actually not taken this advice, they'll come back and go like "Mom, you were right. This is way too much work." It was like, "she's crazy." I said "Yeah, well, people aren't projects though. You want somebody that's, you know, everybody's got issues so, but you just don't want somebody with way more than you have." C. G. Cooper: Yes. Just so you know I'm writing that down right now, 'cause I have younger kids, and I'm definitely going to be telling that to each and every one of them soon. Tabitha Lord: I wrote a whole blog post about it. I'll send it to you when I'm done and you can save it, file it away. C. G. Cooper: I'm in. Totally. Then did you say you had one about writing too? Tabitha Lord: Yeah. Well the best piece of advice I would tell, and I tell people now too, is just finish something. I'm sure you've heard it too. If you don't have a draft, you have nothing to work on. So finish the piece, worry about that later. Then the other thing that I've realized in the course of this writing adventure is that, you know finish the piece, celebrate. Open that bottle of champagne. You did it! You wrote a book! Yea! Really own that. Tabitha Lord: Then realize that only about half your work is done. Then move on from there. C. G. Cooper: Do you have, and I know I've been doing this long enough now that I have a hard time with the celebration part, because I'm already onto the next thing. It's like okay, stop, and just take a deep breath, enjoy what you did, work will be here tomorrow, but maybe take a day for yourself and think about what you just accomplished. I'm trying to be better at that. Are you, is that one of your fortes? Are you really good at that? Tabitha Lord: No, I'm not. I'm not very good at it 'cause I have, always, a million other projects. I do really try to take the day. The day that I finish a draft, I try to say "okay, I'm going to binge watch a television show now. I'm going to reward myself." Actually, when I finished Infinity, the second book in the series, I binged watched Jessica Jones. It took me only like two days. But that was my treat to myself. C. G. Cooper: I like it. Tabitha Lord: But, that was all I could do. After that, I'm like alright you've got that short story, you've got a contract to finish, and you've got to start working on the next. You've got this thing due. I'm like okay, so that was it, but I did do that. That was my reward. C. G. Cooper: Good. Well I've got to think about that. I've got to remind myself. Alright, two more quick questions. Number one, what is one piece of technology you could not live without? Tabitha Lord: Well I don't know, I guess you can live without it but I can't imagine writing longhand. I need my laptop. I can't think about how would I do that, how would you cut and paste, do you just squiggle and cross out? I mean obviously when I was a kid I used to write longhand, I mean we've all done it, if we're old enough we've done it, but boy, how do you live without your word processing programs? C. G. Cooper: I hope I never have to be there. Tabitha Lord: I don't want to ever find out. The other thing that I find that I use a lot, and this isn't really technology, but it kind of is similar, is thesaurus.com. I use that thing pretty much 20 times every time I sit down to write. I'm like I need a word for "blah." I guess it's made us lazy in the same way that MapQuest and ... what do you call it ... Waze has made us a little bit lazy about knowing where we are in the world. I guess that's made me lazy about actually thinking about all the words I know that mean the same thing as that word. But I hit thesaurus.com with absolute ease. C. G. Cooper: Good. Alright, one more quick question. We're right up on time. Who do you look up to? Tabitha Lord: Okay. That's such a tough one because I could always say my mom, then my dad, then my husband. But I would say in terms of the writing piece, when I really think about not being inspired, not being encouraged, but actually technically writing well, my tenth grade English teacher. I really have to say I am grateful to her. She held our feet to the fire about how important it was. It's like when you're a dancer and you have to take classical ballet training even if you're not going to be a ballerina, because you have to understand, you have to know how to do the basics. You have to be able to move in your body. You have to know how to write technically, in order to write creatively, I think. Maybe you don't, but it's my experience that you, that that's a gift to be able to do that so you can then focus on the creativity. So I am thankful and grateful and admired her dedication to that for us. C. G. Cooper: Great. It's always good to have good mentors growing up. I know I still need them to slap me around and put me back in place every once in a while. Tabitha, thank you again, so much, for being with us. Can you let the listeners know one more time how they can find you and your work? Tabitha Lord: Sure. I'm TabithaLordAuthor.com so all of my social media can link to from there. My first book Horizon is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and all the ebook ibook outlet distributors, and so is Infinity, now that's been released since June of this year. The short fiction, I have a contribution in an anthology called Sirens with Word Weaver Press and I'll have two more coming out in the next six months with other anthologies and other publishing houses, and they'll be linked on my website. That's how you can find me. C. G. Cooper: Great. Awesome. Tabitha Lord: Thank you so much C. G. Cooper: Thank you. Listeners, check out Tabitha's stuff. We will have all the links on the website cg-cooper.com just click on the podcast tabs. This has been Books in 30 with C. G.Cooper. Thank you for listening and don't forget to email me at cgc (at) cg-cooper.com to say hello or let me know about an author you'd like to see as my guest. Thanks for tuning in. This is C. G. Cooper out.
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