FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 3, 2007

DEBUT THRILLER PARALLELS COMPELLING LIFE

Cheryl Swanson’s first novel is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy on a tragic odyssey and a sister who won’t rest until she proves that he’s not capable of murder. There is a bit of both characters in the author, who freely admits she’s broken a lot of rules.

When fifty-year-old Cheryl Swanson was in the midst of cancer treatment, she found her spirit surging back to life, even while her body was being devastated. By the time her treatment was completed, she had beat down the bureaucracy of two countries to adopt a child. And she had completed the novel that had been teasing at her brain for decades.

It wasn’t easy, because Swanson said that her year-long cancer treatment regimen was the stuff of nightmares. “I spent December 27. 2002—the night after my third major cancer surgery—in a hospital room with a woman screaming in pain, while helicopters landed on the roof outside. When my morphine pump stopped working, I was screaming with her. The nurses ignored us, except for one who came in and told us to please shut up. When you go through something like that, you know, exactly, what the worst situation in the world feels like. My challenge with my novel was to put that utterly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”

Swanson had published three non-fiction books, one on esoteric imaging technology, and two on marketing, so she thought she had an edge with her novel. But she found that the fiction-publishing world was dominated by towering corporations who seemed to only accidentally acquire books of value. “In the 1970s there was this inexorable rise of behemoth mall chain stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble. Plus, there was a consolidation of many small publishers into giant conglomerates. Personally, I felt queasy (and it wasn’t just the chemotherapy) about having my first novel published by someone connected directly to violent videogames. Those games bring in tens of millions while they, incidentally, teach kids how to accurately aim handguns at human targets. The very thing my amateur sleuth’s kid-brother gets tangled up in—with some very bad consequences.”

According to Swanson, the world of publishing has become so dominated by a few big names that new authors are getting short shrift. “You’ve got this nonsense like Charles Frazier selling, not a real book, but a three-paragraph discussion of his next book—to Random House for $11 million. In the meantime, how much time is Random House going to devote to a new writer to whom they advance a comparatively paltry 30 thousand? The reality is that it can take two to seven years to find an audience for your fiction. When you work with the majors, you’ve got one shot. It’s about as narrow a window as you can imagine.”

Swanson did some checking and made some phone calls. “There was this small publishing company I’d never heard of in Canada—Zumaya Publications. The writers said Zumaya was interested in helping them develop and build a readership. Alice McDermott, Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Cunningham and Tom Wolfe all built a readership slowly before ‘breaking out.’ They have the sort of careers writers dream of—they get to write about what was compelling to them at the moment, not just a constant repeat of their first novel, because that is what their publisher deems commercial. “

According to Swanson, in spite of the changes in publishinng, readers want what they’ve always wanted: great stories with great characters. “If that story comes from someone who came of age the same way they did—the school of hard knocks—so much the better,” she added. “Such people as Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Thomas Pynchon, and Martin Amis were published because their stories were compelling. Truthfully, most good writers are introverted, bland, and unpromotable figures. Have you ever seen Norman Mailer in person? I mean, on the best day of his life he wouldn’t have looked good on a magazine cover.”

Mid-cancer treatment, Swanson also had to accomplish that mysterious, elusive thing known as earning a living. Particularly since she and her husband were adopting a little girl from Guatemala. I wanted someone who would help me build a good readership and not expect me to instantly “break out.” What I found at Zumaya was genuine, long-term support from my editor and publishers. One of my publishers created my cover—I can’t even enumerate her cover art awards. My editor was a latter day, female Maxwell Perkins. In this age of the Nanosecond Attention Span, the kind of help and attention I had from that company was amazing.”

“I hope to be writing and publishing fiction when I am very old—hell, with my medical history, I hope to even reach very old,” Swanson added. “I’ve got a fighting chance, because, much as I bitch about the medical profession, I had great doctors. Truth be told, I also believe in God and the power of prayer—something almost all cancer survivors get in touch with.”

Swanson is writing a book about the 2,599,999 other women like her—a survivor’s guide to breast cancer. “My fellow patients were African-American, Jewish, Russian, Italian, Chinese, and Latino women from every step of the social ladder,” she said. “Their stories are what I tell in that book. Writing a novel and simultaneously circumventing a lot of petty bureaucrats was not that big a deal. Probably the only thing I was seriously worried about was trying to make total baldness seem like a fashion statement when I was in Guatemala City. What I discovered was that everyone in the world knows that San Francisco people look, dress and act weird. No one even raised an eyebrow.”

“When I turn it around in my mind, cancer teaches you that you simply have to gut it out,” Swanson said. “Stick with your dreams but understand that it takes real gumption to get anything worthwhile accomplished. In my case, it took something really nasty to turn me around. I’d always wondered—when would I get around to adopting a child and taking a shot at being a novelist? As cancer treatment puréed me, I knew: the time was now. Or never.”

Cheryl Swanson is available for bookstore signings or motivational talks and interviews. She can be reached at cherylaswanson@gmail.com.