SPECIAL OFFER: Listen to our audio interview with Carolyn J. Rose and leave a comment at the bottom of the post to be entered to win her latest book.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 13:25 — 18.4MB)
Vancouver author Carolyn J. Rose’s life is a broad stroke across the continent. She grew up in New York’s Catskill Mountains and moved to Little Rock, Ark. to work as a VISTA volunteer. She extended her Arkansas adventure and took a two-year position in the governor’s office as part of the Commission on the Status of Women.
Her paid writing career began after that. She wrote television commercials, but eventually grew weary of trying to craft new ways of saying “low prices.” She convinced the news director to take her on as a researcher.
Vancouver author and indie publisher Carolyn J. Rose
Wanderlust, and a whim for warmer weather brought her to Albuquerque, N.M. She landed a promotion director’s job and eventually began producing the nightly newscasts. Her television experience was a hotbed of high anxiety and creativity. Rose’s fictional character Casey Brandt – a snarky, amateur detective in the Consulted to Death, Driven to Death, and Dated to Death mysteries – was conceived somewhere between stress management and creative streaks.
Rose married fellow author Mike Nettleton and moved to Vancouver when Nettleton lost his job at a radio station, and the couple decided to move closer to Nettleton’s son. After settling in, the couple joined a writers’ critique group led by Elizabeth Lyon, author of The Sell Your Novel Toolkit, and Rose’s writing career moved full force. Rose and her husband have penned several books both as a team and individually.
For many years, the couple team-taught a night class at Clark College that focused on helping other writers get published. At the beginning of the year, Rose passed the college teacher’s baton to another local author Randall Houle.
Currently, Rose is a substitute teacher in Vancouver and is inspired by today’s teens and inspires them. Her acerbic wit and willingness to connect with students, wherever they are on the learning continuum, makes her a favorite in the classroom. Her students’ friendly banter may also end up in one of her novels and many have lobbied to be in her next book – as the dead body.
Since publishing her first mystery, which she now says “was awful,” her book sales have taken a leap with the decision to move into indie publishing. She now commissions her own covers and proofreaders and posts her product on Amazon to be read on a Kindle.
Rose released two new Kindle books this year, A Place of Forgetting, a love story set in 1966, and the suspense novel, An Uncertain Refuge. She has also written four solo mysteries and co-authored four mysteries and a fantasy with her husband, Mike Nettleton.
Rose describes her husband as the man “who once made a battleship out of Scotch tape” and herself as “the woman who uses duct tape to hem her jeans.” The ‘deadly duo‘ will be taking part in Cover to Cover’s first annual holiday book fair Saturday, Dec. 10.
The book fair was originally slated to take place last year, but was delayed when Cover to Cover experienced smoke damage when a nearby business caught fire. The disaster shut the bookshop down temporarily. It reopened on St. Johns Blvd earlier this year.
A podcast of our interview with Carolyn J. Rose is here.
A podcast of our interview with Cover to Cover owner, Mel Sanders, is here.
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