Whenever I teach a writing course, someone inevitably asks me, “What are the odds that my novel will be published?
Some questions shouldn’t be asked, and that’s one of them. The odds are stacked against any fiction writer. By some accounts, publishers accept fewer than one submission in a thousand.
Luckily for Coronado resident Ellen Bryson, she never considered the odds. Or perhaps Bryson is just used to bucking them. After all, she was a professional dancer in Cleveland, Boston, and New York for many years, and rejection was part and parcel of that trade. (As she remembers it, “Most of the time I was poor, lonely, tired and too skinny. It was wonderful!”)
Still, to have a first novel published at the age of 60, and a first novel as interesting and accomplished as “The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno,” puts Bryson in rare company.
“The seed for writing the book occurred a good decade ago,” she said. “I had this vivid dream of six sisters standing around in a horseshoe pattern. All of the sisters were beautiful, but the strange thing is that all of them had big, full beards.”
The image of bearded ladies led Bryson to start researching circus attractions, and hirsute females, which led her to P.T. Barnum and his American Museum in New York City. In addition to finding the “image” of her bearded lady, Bryson also stumbled upon a picture of Isaac Sprague, a stick figure of a man that Barnum billed as the Living Skeleton. It was a eureka moment for Bryson, for she knew she had found her main character.
Read the entire North County Times article here.
