One of the new features with the website is authors are now able to support IHS through paid advertising. Many authors have joined our Advertising Pilot Program to help us test the ads and to allow wiggle room for our website developers to make adjustments in real time.
As a way to show our appreciation for sponsoring the all-new I Heart SapphFic, we’re turning today’s spotlight on Eva Reddy!
I’m so glad I’ve returned to writing; it’s been good for my soul. When I was in my late twenties some friends convinced me to write a short story for a competition. The required topic was “My First True Love” and those chosen would be published in a book of short stories. All very exciting stuff really. So, I sat at my Remington manual typewriter and pounded out a heartfelt account of my first experiences in love and love-making. I sent off my little story feeling just as nervous as I was during that first tryst. A few weeks later my story was returned to me with more red ink on it than the black I’d written it in. The comments were scathing and I was devastated.
So, I left writing behind and immersed myself in my studies in Human Services, leading to a career working with people whose disability posed a significant challenge to finding and keeping a job. Eventually my writing skills were useful in the development of legal documents used to provide a platform from which employers, unions and governments could provide and approve paid employment using a fair and independently assessed productivity-based wage system. The documents became a widely used template known as, ‘The Carol Price Model.’
More than a quarter of a century since writing that first story, I found myself caring for my mother in the home I share with Suzi, my soul mate of more than 23 years. And somehow, in between the daily gauntlet of nebulizers, heart medications and physiotherapies, amongst the constant appointments with the local doctor, dietician, speech pathologist, occupational and physiotherapists, not to mention the lung specialist and the heart specialist appointments, I managed to write a few more of my little stories.
I shared them with my best friend, who convinced me to give writing another go. She also became my Beta-reader and as such, challenged me and encouraged me, but most of all, inspired me with her wonderful ideas of what I should write about next. The end result of this too-ing and fro-ing was finally published as ‘Coffee Breaks’ by Eva Reddy.
Why Eva Reddy? Well, there was the concern that those who made use of the ‘Carol Price Model’ would see a book called, Coffee Breaks by Carol Price and think that it might hold something useful for their workplace. Hence, it was decided that a different audience needed a different pen-name. Eva Reddy is based on a nickname I was given around the time I wrote that first short story. Ever-ready was the nickname, after a battery commercial at the time where one battery-operated toy was always a bit more manic and able to last longer than all the others. I was named for it by close friends.
To the woman who red-inked my first serious attempt at writing I say, “Thank you.” I’m very proud of the work I’ve achieved in Human Services and wouldn’t trade a moment of it for anything. That particular story is among those in ‘Coffee Breaks’ and as it would happen, a favorite of Heather Bennett, who reviewed the book for LOTL and Curve Magazines.
