A Greene author has had her first novel, a romantic comedy, published by a Waterville press.
By Seth Golden
Special to the Sun Journal

GREENE – When publishers said no to Diane Amos eight times, she tried a ninth time.

The 56-year-old recently had her debut novel published, a book titled “Getting Personal.”

Amos has written for seven years and has churned out a total of nine books, but this is her first to be published. And it wasn’t easy.

“I think it takes a lot of perseverance and stubbornness,” she said. “You definitely have to believe in yourself. Maybe you need to be a little bit of a dreamer, too.”

When she got “the call” on Oct. 16 at 10:11 a.m., “it was a dream.” She said, “The odds of getting published today are a lot slimmer than years past.”

Written in the first person, “Getting Personal” centers on main character Monique St. Cyr, an obituary writer for a tabloid-style newspaper in Portland, Maine.

St. Cyr wants to climb her paper’s masthead a bit by becoming an investigative reporter. So she works at impressing her bosses.

Meanwhile, her next-door mother, Anne Marie, is an erotic fiction author at work on a book about couples who meet online. Anne Marie enlists Monique’s help by filling out personal ads for her daughter and launching them into cyberspace.

“Soon she’s getting all these e-mails from these guys,” Amos said, adding that Monique has a tendency to be impulsive.

Her complicated life gets more complicated when she meets Jake Dube, a policeman …

Amos is also a painter, who runs the Rustic Palette fine arts studio part of the week in Greene where she teaches painting to adults and children.

Surrounded by a sea of books, she writes in an office.

Her process starts with an idea, Amos said. Some writers do long outlines, she said, while others simply fly “into the mist” and let their imaginations take flight. “I kind of go in between the two,” Amos said.

She writes her first three chapters without an outline and allows herself to get to know her characters. Then she writes a five-page, double-spaced synopsis detailing what will happen in the rest of the book. She submits the three chapters and the synopsis to publishers and continues to write, ideally every day.

At a certain point, the characters take over. “Things happen that I didn’t even realize were going to happen,” she said.

Membership in online writers’ groups help her with character research. For example, one character in her book is a part-time private eye named Richard. An author from one of the online writers’ groups put her in touch with a real-life P.I. who Amos interviewed for details for her book.

“Getting Personal” took appropriately, and approximately, nine months to complete. But Amos couldn’t work on it full-time.

In the past, given more time, Amos has, with Faulkner-like fury, pounded out as many as 200 manuscript pages in five weeks.

Getting lucky

Readers have responded well to “Getting Personal,” a 321-page romantic comedy, Amos said,

“They feel a connection to Monique,” Amos said. “They feel that she’s the average woman.” St. Cyr doesn’t have the perfect build of the lithe ladies pushed on the public by Madison Avenue advertisers.

The book’s humor had an effect on her editor, Russell Davis of Five Star Publishing, based in Waterville.

“My book had him laughing out loud,” Amos said.

She believes getting published has a lot to do with luck, finding the right person at the right time. “What one editor loves, the next one hates.”

With publishing houses disappearing like puddles in the Mojave Desert, Amos has done well to find her book a home.

It can get frustrating for a writer when rejection letters filled with praise sound more like acceptance letters, she said.

“I guess you write because you have to write. It’s something that you enjoy,” Amos said, who urges aspiring writers not to give up.

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