Mary Carroll Moore

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Show notes

In this interview with author Mary Carroll Moore, we talk about her new book, A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue, which is available for preorder and launches on October 24th, 2023. In a former life, Mary was a syndicated food journalist who wrote many food and cooking-related articles and books. At fifty, she went back to school for her MFA and began not only writing, but also teaching fiction.

Mary’s curiosity about aviation was piqued by her mother, Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Hartz Carroll, who earned her pilot license in 1942 and flew with the Women Airforce Service Pilots during WWII. That curiosity inspired her to create two modern-day aviation characters, one an inland search and rescue pilot, and one an aerobatic pilot, in this new thriller novel that features a false murder accusation, a run from the law, and estranged sisters who reunite.

Mary was also inspired to try flying herself. She recently started taking lessons and is both excited and overwhelmed by all there is to learn. Let’s give her a warm welcome to the community, and support her by buying her new book!

We also talk in-depth about her writing and publishing journey during this conversation. A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue is a stand-alone novel but is also the sequel to Mary’s first work of fiction, Qualities of Light. You can find Mary at her website MaryCarrollMoore.com and on LinkedIn @MaryCarrollMoore.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Liz Booker: Hello and welcome. I’m Liz Booker, Literary Aviatrix, and I am excited to celebrate the launch of a new book, A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue by Mary Carol Moore.

Mary, welcome.

[00:00:23] Mary Carroll Moore: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:26] Liz Booker: Oh, I’m so excited to talk to you about this book. I hear that it’s launching on October 24th. Is that right?

[00:00:32] Mary Carroll Moore: It is. And it’s already a bestseller on Amazon, which is like outrageous to me from pre order.

[00:00:37] Liz Booker: Nice work. Congratulations. That’s really good. We want to talk about that a little bit more when we get into the writing portion of our conversation.

Can you give us a synopsis of the book?

[00:00:48] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, it’s about a female aviator. Which is, of course, a great topic for this program. And she’s on the run from the law. She’s framed for an attack and which becomes a murder that she didn’t commit. And the only place she knows to go is her estranged sisters. So she takes her little plane and she tries to get to her estranged sisters.

And she crashes. She has a crash landing and has to recover from that and go on foot. And then the whole story is about the meeting her sister for the first time. And the secrets about their past that unfold. So it’s kind of a literary thriller in a sense that you combine the crime and the chase.

There’s search and rescue pilots in there, and also this relationship that’s very complex between the sisters.

[00:01:33] Liz Booker: Oh, I’m so excited for this book. I cannot wait to read it. Of course, with my background as a former search and rescue helicopter pilot. I love the theme. Yeah, yeah, I was in the Coast Guard for 28 years and that was my job for, about 12 years at that time. And so, yeah, I love the themes of the book. I also am a huge fan of when authors who are prolific as you are in other works and other genres bring that talent and their interest to aviation. So tell us about yourself and what brings you to the story.

[00:02:09] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, my mom, really she, I have her logbook here.

This is, she was a Women’s Air Service Pilot, Air Force Service Pilot, and she got her license in 1940. Look at this. She got her license in 1942, and she was non military at that time, although they got military status later. She was one of the WASPs, and she grew, I grew up with this history of a woman pilot, my mom, who seemed very ordinary in every aspect of her life, and then she had this incredible history.

For two years she was in the WASP. And you know probably that 20, 000 women applied and only 1, 000 got in. So, she applied twice, she got in second time. And I always wanted to, she said she’d teach me to fly, but she had four kids. and a full time job, so that wasn’t possible, but I always wanted to kind of delve into the mystery of her life as a pilot, and I have her WASP books and all of her logbook and all that, and stories that she’s given me recorded on my phone, but I really wanted to search out what the WASPs were all about, so my whole book is about what women pilots are what kind of strength and fortitude and, and unusual stamina it might take to become a woman pilot.

So the two main characters in my book are both pilots, one search and rescue, and the other is a stunt. So it’s been fabulous to kind of relive my mom’s history writing the book.

[00:03:45] Liz Booker: I absolutely love all of that so much. Oh my goodness. Well, what was your mom’s name first of all?

[00:03:52] Mary Carroll Moore: Her name is Betty Hartz, Carroll,

[00:03:54] Liz Booker: Betty Hartz, Carroll, we honor her. We honor her. We thank you for her trailblazing. Especially all of us female pilots honor the, the wasp, but especially those of us in the military, because they laid the groundwork for us to come in and be successful and have careers. So we’re very grateful to her for that.

And what a wonderful way to grow up. Yeah, that’s great. We’ve read several stories that that feature the wasp. And so and we have one very prolific author who has written a lot about them, who I was fortunate to have the opportunity, Sarah Byrne Rickman to interview. So she, she basically embedded herself with those ladies and became their friends and then just started writing about them, which is, we’re, we’re grateful to her for that.

And grateful to you to, to bring your curiosity to our world and that that’s one of the things like the, what you were saying, like what does it take to be a female pilot and I like to talk about the books, over 600 books on the market that feature women in aviation. Now one more, thanks to you that are human stories and they are stories of tenacity, adventure, and courage. And it sounds like you’ve got all that wrapped up into this book as well.

[00:05:10] Mary Carroll Moore: Oh, my mom told me stories about dead sick landings at LaGuardia when her engine caught on fire and she got lost over West Point and had to have a military escort when she landed unofficially there.

And she buzzed my grandmother’s house when my dad and her were dating and he kept trying to change the radio to a jazz station and she was like wanting to listen to the tower and that was really fun. Hearing her stories made me just like crave that adventure. And it wasn’t until I got to writing the book that I started taking pilot lessons, flying lessons, and I’m hooked.

[00:05:45] Liz Booker: Oh yeah. Okay. So tell us about that. When did you start flying and how far along are you?

[00:05:49] Mary Carroll Moore: Just recently, I don’t have hardly any hours yet, but I’m just fascinated with the whole thing, and I found an airport nearby and an instructor, so I’ve started, and I’m, I’m just we’re in New Hampshire, so it’s going to be cold, but he says that the air being heavier in winter and fall is better, and you can learn better.

I don’t know. We’ll see, but I just it’s like so much to learn for you, you’ve done it for years, but for me, I, I looked at those dials and that little Cessna Acro Arabat, and I went, Oh my God how am I going to learn this? And then my impression was that my mom, suddenly I understood a lot more about her because sitting in that pilot seat and actually imagining how she would have done all these things that she did as a wasp.

And then she was so modest about it when we were growing up, it hardly ever came up in conversation.

[00:06:41] Liz Booker: So. Yeah, that’s a very familiar story. I think among people who have relatives who are wasp. Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. Well, congratulations for jumping into it. And I hope that you enjoy it.

It should be a challenge. But also gives you a real. Big sense of accomplishment when you start to master those skills. So good luck on that journey.

[00:07:09] Mary Carroll Moore: I’m thinking also, cause I’m older and I I could have done this when I was younger, but I was working and I was raising my son and marriage and life and house and all that stuff.

So now that I’m an empty nester and I have the time, I, I think. Do you think older women can learn how to be pilots? That’s the big question I’m asking myself.

[00:07:30] Liz Booker: So yes, they can. I know many.

[00:07:33] Mary Carroll Moore: Okay. Good.

[00:07:34] Liz Booker: Yeah. No, welcome to the community. You’re in it now. All right. That’s so great. So, but you have written so many other books.

So we want to talk about writing like in more depth later, but just give us like an overview of your writing career.

[00:07:48] Mary Carroll Moore: Sure. Thank you. When I was a 19, I lived in France for a year and I studied cooking there and I came home and lived in Arizona and I actually started teaching cooking classes and the local magazine, Arizona kind of Arizona life kind of magazine asked me to write a cooking column and that was my first publication and I did it every month and then I opened a cooking school in California and I got.

I got asked to do cookbooks, and one of them won a huge award, Julia Child award that year, and then I got into writing a syndicated column for the L. A. Times Syndicate. Which was in 86 newspapers around the country. So my food career, my food journalism was a big deal for me. It kept me going. It was my career, my, my job for many decades.

And then I, I actually had breast cancer. And because of that, I had that moment that a lot of people go through when they have. illness that they look at their life and they say have I done what I want to do with my life? And I realized what I really wanted to do is become a fiction writer. I’d always written stories and I’d loved it, but.

I knew that I had to go back to school to learn, and so I did. I went to grad school at age 50, and got my MFA. And I know you have an MFA too, so you know how that, it’s a big deal to do that. And then I started writing fiction, and my first novel, which was called Qualities of Light, was published in 2009.

And it was nominated for a Penn Faulkner Award, and a couple other awards. So, it’s been fun, and this is my second novel now, so. That’s my my career in like a little nutshell.

[00:09:33] Liz Booker: That’s amazing. So interesting. I, I want to hear so much more about the food stuff.

So let’s get into a little bit more about the book. So where is it set?

[00:09:44] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, the book is set in the Adirondack mountains of New York state, which is a pretty remote, but beautiful area. My grandmother, another. Strong woman in my family, my mom’s mom actually owned a hiking camp for kids there for about 30 years. And I went every summer when I was between six and 16 for two months.

[00:10:03] Liz Booker: Oh, I sent my eldest son to camp in the Adirondacks for several years. Yeah. Cause I was on active duty in the military and I was moving around during his middle school and high school years. And so what I did was I sent him to a camp in the Adirondacks so that every summer he had the same peer group. Because he wouldn’t have in the schools. Yeah, that’s so great. That’s beautiful up there.

[00:10:26] Mary Carroll Moore: Oh, it’s gorgeous. It’s our second home. My family still has some property there. But I wanted to write, I call them my Adirondack novels, because I wrote the first one based in the Adirondacks also. And this one, I decided to have a sister, two estranged sisters, one of them living in the Adirondacks as a search and rescue pilot.

The other one is an indie musician who lives in North Carolina, and she is framed for an attack which turns into a murder, as I said, and she runs. She has to flee, and her mother, who says the only place you can run that nobody will find you is your, your sisters. You’ve never met her, she doesn’t know about you even.

Nobody knows she exists, so. She steals a plane, a little Cessna, and she flies into what turns out to be a storm, and she has to land through an emergency landing, and in the process of emergency landing, she tears the fuselage, and she has to get out of the plane really fast, because the avionics flicker so there’s a short, and then there’s an explosion, and then she’s on foot, somewhat injured, has to find her way to her sisters, and they reunite.

And it’s a very difficult relationship because one of them is the product of illegal marriage and the other is the product of an affair. So I really wanted to work with a thriller aspect, the chase, the bad guy actually comes after her. The Search and rescue, because I’m fascinated with search and rescue.

So that whole scenario is the thriller aspect and then the relationship between the sisters, which is very complex with a lot of history, a lot of hurt, a lot of abandonment kind of how that would be getting healed. So that was kind of the basic, the gist of the novel.

[00:12:17] Liz Booker: And how did you do your research for it?

[00:12:20] Mary Carroll Moore: Ah, that was hard. So when I, I first decided, I, I didn’t actually have pilots in it at the beginning, the early drafts, but I’m fascinated with flying because, because of my mom, so I thought, why not? I’m going to, I’m going to see what I can learn, and we live across the street in New Hampshire from a search and rescue family.

They, their dogs are search and rescue dogs. And, and so I learned a little bit about that, and I was like, Oh, I, I’ve got to learn more about this. How do people do it? And then one of my students, when I taught writing classes, was a flight instructor, a certified flight instructor. And so she said, I would help you with anything you need.

And I said, really? So I would send her chapters, and she would correct them. And she had a cohort of other flight instructors where she, she taught in Phoenix. And they got together, they would get together and every week and talk about my scenes and my chapters, I couldn’t believe it. And I said, okay, I really want to have a crash scene where the plane explodes, but the pilot actually survives. How is that possible?

So they went into all the carburetor, what all these different things that could have happened. And they came up with a couple of scenarios and I tested them out in the chapter and ran it by my, my friend again. And she said, this works. This works. That’s so great.

[00:13:41] Liz Booker: Good for you.

[00:13:42] Mary Carroll Moore: It’s a way. It’s amazing. I got help. It’s like, yeah. How do you write about something that you don’t know about? That’s the big question. A lot of people do, but enormous amount of research. Because you want to get it right.

[00:13:56] Liz Booker: And did I read that you said that this is a sequel to your first novel?

[00:14:01] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, it’s the same family. Only four or five years later, I think. Three or four years later, yeah. So there’s some relationships that are continuing, but it’s a standalone. So if people haven’t read the first one, they can still enjoy this one. I wanted to make it completely separate, but I had a lot of fans from the first one.

So I said, what happened to Molly? Who’s one of the characters. So I made sure that Molly was in this one too.

[00:14:27] Liz Booker: Okay. That’s really fun. Yeah. And I was going to ask if this could be a standalone too. So that’s great. Yeah. Good. What else do you want to talk about, about the book?

[00:14:37] Mary Carroll Moore: Oh, let’s see. Well, I think that there’s a couple of things that were important to me as a writer and working with this book.

The first was, was my mom, to use the book, the story, the research as a way of getting to know her because she was so busy and so. I don’t know, World War II women sometimes, and service women, they, they didn’t want to talk about it anymore it was done, it’s over, so you’ve run into this before.

I, I think it was so fascinating to me, and I wanted so much to talk to her about it, but she really did not have time for it, even when she was very elderly, and she had lots of time to talk, we, we didn’t get into the flying as much, except for certain stories. So, part of my reason for writing this was to get to know her, and imagine what it would be like to be in the pilot seat and imagine what it would be like to do some dangerous stuff that she did.

The other thing that was really important to me was I lost a sister when I was younger, my older sister, who was my idol when I was growing up, she was eight years older than me and she was beautiful and very fashionable and like everything I wanted to be. And she died early and I felt like I never got to really know her or. In the last years of her life, she was very difficult to be around, and it was hard for me, because I really wanted to get close to her. And then when she passed, I felt like I had lost this huge opportunity. So I wanted to write a book about sisters that actually did get back together, and did find family with each other.

So that was like a big part of my, my need to write the book to explore the sister relationship, which is very complicated. And I mean, for most people, and what would it be like if you had a second chance? No. So that was my, my kind of inner reason for writing the story about sisters.

[00:16:35] Liz Booker: Well, I love that. I’ve heard several authors talk about writing, basically writing an alternate ending to, to something that happened for them in their lives. So I think that that’s a wonderful thing that we can do with our imaginations to help us process our whatever has happened in our lives. So that’s really special.

Well, that’s amazing. Mary, I’m so excited about this book. I am equally excited to have such a prolific and experienced writer and teacher. So you have also been teaching, do you, did you teach writing as well as cooking?

[00:17:07] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, I stopped my food career and then I first, my first writing class that I taught was called healing through writing cause I was recovering from breast cancers and the surgery and the chemo and everything.

And so I offered it as a benefit to a writing school that I taught at. And it sold out, lots of people came, and it was amazing to me that so many people wanted to learn how to use writing for healing. And now there are documented studies, the University of Texas has many studies about the whole idea that the process of writing a certain way can actually change the metabolism of the body, increase the healing capacity.

So, that was my first class that I ever taught, and then I went on to teach for about two more decades. Both in person and online at different schools around the U. S. in Boston and in Wisconsin, Minnesota, some other places. So it’s been fascinating. I’ve traveled a lot to teach classes and loved it.

[00:18:07] Liz Booker: Well, we’re so fortunate to have you here. Tell us about your books that you’ve published.

[00:18:12] Mary Carroll Moore: Okay. Besides, besides the fiction,

[00:18:14] Liz Booker: because I know you have one about writing, right?

[00:18:17] Mary Carroll Moore: I do.

Yeah. I have one called Your Book Starts Here. And that was born out of my first 10 years of teaching book structuring classes because the whole premise that I worked with was that people could use in, in creating a book, they, they could use a structure tool called a storyboard which is known by filmmakers. And I started using it for my books. And I found that I could create these kind of small bits of a story and write them in random ways. Like I could start with chapter 15 or the end or whatever. I didn’t have to go sequentially. And once I had the material like a certain number of words 30, 000 is usually what people start with for this.

You could actually arrange it now into a flow using a storyboard. A diagram. And so I taught this for years and then I created my book, Your Book Starts Here, to teach people how to do that. And it’s it’s done really well. A lot of people like it. So, the whole storyboarding idea for, for fiction and not, and non fiction too, has been fascinating to me to use.

[00:19:24] Liz Booker: I was given something similar by one of my advisors in the writing program that I did. It was very helpful and I think I need to revisit it because my novel has some issues that I haven’t the creative process for me has been so interesting. I’m used to the military world where there’s a problem or a mission and we have the tools to go solve it and then we go solve it and then it’s done. That’s not how the creative process works. And I’m not sure I’m completely attuned to mine yet, but all of this to say that I have a problem in my novel that I haven’t been able to figure out. I’ve been letting it just marinate for now months days turn into weeks, turn into months and the problem has not magically come to me. So I’m going to get your book and I’m going to dissect my story and see if I can solve the problems that way.

[00:20:28] Mary Carroll Moore: It’s not a bad idea. There’s, there’s tons of, of tools out there for, I think that’s one of the things the creative life can lack that people think it’s just a free form.

You just sit down and write and it all comes together and it never does to me. So I’ve always had to do that free form writing, that flow writing and then pause and go back and analyze it for structure. And then the structure can kind of provide a roadmap or a visual map for where you’re going. You can know, am I still writing the book I started out writing or is it a completely different book now? So then come back to the flow after that.

[00:21:07] Liz Booker: That is so great. And then what else? Any other books that you’ve published that we haven’t talked about yet?

[00:21:13] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, a lot of food books. I’ve, I’ve written just maybe 11 or 12 food books. So those are, those are the main. Yeah, I know. I know. But it was my career for a long time. I get hired by, oh, I don’t know, Rodale Press who does prevention magazine and they had a series of books they wanted somebody to write. So that happened pretty effortlessly for a long time. And basically I lived off of that. So that was great.

[00:21:40] Liz Booker: Commission work.

[00:21:41] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, it was commissioned work a lot of times. And then I proposed, I had an agent and I proposed a couple of titles and they got sold. So I’ve been mostly in the healthy cooking area, the using organic or healthy or natural. Methods for cooking and still making it taste really good.

Cause I, I wrote for food and wine for a while, that magazine and things like that. So I just I had a long and happy career as a food journalist. And then I stopped I didn’t want to smell like garlic anymore.

[00:22:11] Liz Booker: Going back to what you said about writing being healing or using writing to heal. That’s one of the things that I talk about because frankly, there are a lot of women in our community who I would, I would just say that were traumatized by their experiences. You know, in the male dominated field and especially our earlier women who, they, they were not treated well. And so a lot of the ones who have decided to write their stories definitely have shared how healing that has been, that process has been for them. The writing, the getting the story out in the world and talking about it kind of diminishes its power a little bit. Yeah, and so, yeah, and so the part of the thing that I’m doing here is encouraging other women in aviation to tell their stories and giving them the tools to do it well.

And so talking to authors like you who have advice about how to do that, just encouraging them. And I’m all, I’m. Always so stoked. Like at one of our conferences, I had a lady, fellow Coast Guard pilot come up to me and say, she almost whispered it. And she said, I’ve been writing like, Oh, good, good for you.

And she was like, and it’s so cathartic. And I was like, Exactly. And then she said, nobody’s ever going to see it. And I was like, well, just hold that thought. Maybe later they’ll see it, but I just love to hear that from people because .

Yeah, when you can find,

[00:23:53] Mary Carroll Moore: I agree. I’ve seen so much transformation when people actually start writing about the, things that happened to them. And they say that there’s like, aspects of most cathartic process of writing is that you actually describe the details of what happened and then you talk about what you felt then and what you feel now. So it’s three parts and that’s not my theory, it’s James Pennebaker from the University of Texas, but the idea that the three parts come together and when I used to teach this I found that people that did one of the parts say They wrote about how they felt then and the details, but they didn’t compare it to how they felt now.

The healing didn’t actually happen as strongly and it’s, it’s kind of cool to watch that. So I taught that for a number of years to see if I could share it with people that those three parts are really valuable.

[00:24:46] Liz Booker: So, do you have a book about that?

[00:24:48] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, I, I’d be copying because that’s not my idea, but I have written, I have a newsletter on Substack. That I write every week and in there are a lot of materials that I use for my teachings such as the healing through writing ideas So, you know if anybody’s interested they it’s free. They can follow me there and get the great Get this

[00:25:10] Liz Booker: you just find you with your name Mary Carol Moore.

[00:25:12] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, I think it’s Mary Carol Moore Substack dot com or something like that, but I feel like or my website Mary Carol Moore dot com they can look there and they there’s a Sign up form for the newsletter.

But the idea is that these materials are out there and if you know about them and you can use them in your life, it can make your life a lot easier. Yeah. Healing the healing can happen.

[00:25:36] Liz Booker: Yeah, no, that’s great advice. So you have this book coming out. I’m super excited about how you came to me.

So you are working with an agency, and this is just thinking about tools for authors who are marketing their work. You are working with this agency who helps you get, they basically set you up on a book podcast tour and they did a very good job, I think, finding me because I can’t think of a better audience to engage with. So that was so exciting. Tell, tell me about that and what else you’re doing to market this book now that it’s published.

[00:26:18] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, I, I feel like I’m a newbie at this whole thing about marketing, even though I published a lot my books mostly have been I don’t know, I’d say slow burners. My, like my books, your book starts here has been around for 12 years and it’s still selling really well, but I didn’t do a whole lot to promote it. I just. Put it out there. This one, I decided I really wanted the message of women and women’s strength and the idea of pilots and the strength that I saw in my mom to be out there in the world because right now the world needs it.

My God, we need all the hope and the strength that we can get in realistic ways. Not hope, not like a sentimental, but really realistic. These are women that fight for their survival and they do well and they reunite with their family. They see, they find their family. So I really wanted that out there and I thought, okay, what can I do?

So I, I decided there were several things I’ve learned about marketing a book that weren’t actually, there weren’t things that people did when I did my last book. So it’s completely new and one of them’s podcasts. So I, I researched a lot until I found Michelle, who’s the woman who is… Her husband is a pilot, and she’s into aviation and all that, so that’s very cool, and she loved my book, and so we, we decided to work together.

That was one thing, and then another person that I hired was, I don’t know if you know that there’s bloggers, Instagram bloggers that talk about books, bookstagrammers, they’re called.

[00:27:54] Liz Booker: Bookstagrammers, yes.

[00:27:55] Mary Carroll Moore: Bookstagrammers, I know. So this is stuff that I didn’t know at all. So last April, someone one of my students introduced me to someone who does tours on Instagram, book blogger tours, and evidently that’s pretty common.

So I went ahead, I said, okay, I’m going to try this. And that is when my book became a bestseller because the 18 people who have something like 54, 000 followers posted my book cover on their Instagram feeds and where to get it. And suddenly the Amazon ratings just went through the ceiling.

So I thought, this is really good. I, I don’t know who knows about this, but you gotta, you gotta try it if you’re in a new author, cause it’s really fabulous. So the podcast tour and the book, I have a hard time even saying it. Bookster grammar tour are the two things that I found have been really effective.

Or getting the word out to people that I wouldn’t ordinarily talk to.

[00:28:57] Liz Booker: That’s great news, and I think it’s really hard I’ve had a publicist on here, who she primarily does like media, like Like traditional media, publicist stuff, like gets people on radio shows, And morning shows, and that kind of stuff.

But when talking to her and, and, and even in my own efforts to promote like my website or my podcast or whatever, it’s often very difficult to figure out what is working and how it’s working. Like we’re, it’s hard to get metrics on the immediate effect of anything that you do out there.

And so for you to see that jump and to know that it’s working, that’s great news. And it’s good for all of us to understand too. That’s so, that’s so cool.

[00:29:52] Mary Carroll Moore: I didn’t, I would never have expected it. Liz, I was just kind of like blown away. A friend of mine. Who is another author. She just happened to be on my Amazon page and she checked the ratings and she sent me this email.

It was Sunday morning. She said, you are a hot new release.

So I was like, what is that? She actually had to tell me. And I, she said, you’re number five on the hot new releases. And here’s the page and all this stuff. So I was kind of like, well, what it means is that the topic for me, the top, the cover, which I’ll show you here.

The cover of the book appealed to people online. I mean, somehow it just resonated with people. And then the idea that it’s about a female aviator and an estranged family. I don’t know. Maybe it all clicked. And so there’s a lot now.

[00:30:44] Liz Booker: See, I think there’s a lot going on in your title. A woman’s guide to search and rescue. I just, I, I think that there’s so much in that that is appealing

[00:30:56] Mary Carroll Moore: well, it’s. One of the reviewers, I got some really nice trade reviews too, and one of the reviewers said this is a metaphor for the family. Yes, it’s about search and rescue. Yes, it’s about pilots going in and searching a crime scene and crashed airplane and all that. But it’s really about the search and rescue that happens inside. And it’s about these people, these two sisters, trying to search for their family. They’ve both been abandoned in ways that they don’t know how to heal from.

[00:31:26] Liz Booker: Yeah. No, that’s beautiful. Yeah. I can see that.

And, and another thing that my publicist friend who, who did a show with me shared was that pre orders are so important to position you for other potential bestseller lists.

So the fact that you’re getting all the, all this action on Amazon before the book releases is wonderful for you. I hope it just explodes in the world and everybody reads it because we want them to come to the rest of our stories. So we’ll hope that they you pique their interest and they want to come check out some other books by and about women in aviation.

[00:32:08] Mary Carroll Moore: I hope so too. I think it’s a fascinating topic. I mean, I’m personally just thrilled. Completely thrilled to be writing about it.

[00:32:16] Liz Booker: Yeah, so you went from being a non fiction writer to a fiction writer. What advice do you have for anyone who wants to get into writing and they haven’t ever done it before or they’re beginning fiction writing?

What’s your advice?

[00:32:33] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, for me, it was like learning a new language. I was a professional writer I’d been published a lot and I thought, Oh, this will be a piece of cake. I’ll just work right into the fiction world. And it wasn’t, I had to learn it completely anew. It was I’m glad I went back to school because I needed to understand my tendencies as a writer and how that applied to the fiction genre.

And I needed to learn how to plot things. I needed to learn how to not deliver information. Like I had always done with my food columns. And I, my lyrical nature, which is partly from writing food it’s so sensual. You taste and you smell. And so you learn as a food writer, how to write about the textures and the sauce and everything like that.

And I took that right into fiction writing, thinking it would be great. And I remember my instructors in my program taking their red pen and going X, X the huge pages of description completely gone because I, I was too lyrical. I was too, my tendency and my love for that was too strong. So I had to learn to balance my tendencies and I don’t think I could have done that without the instruction I got and the reading I did.

So I started, I think my biggest suggestion would be to. Take classes. There’s lots of great online classes out there. Very strong schools, like I would say Grub Street in Boston or the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. It’s Madeleine Island School of the Arts in Wisconsin is wonderful. There’s so many great writing schools that you can

[00:34:10] Liz Booker: Writers ink San Diego that one of our writers is a part of, yeah.

[00:34:14] Mary Carroll Moore: In Washington, D. C. they have a really good one. So there’s a lot of really good places if you can kind of humble yourself and be a beginner again like I had to. And you can take classes from somebody that knows. Try to open yourself to the language of the writing and the world of the writing, which is probably something you may not be skilled at or familiar with, and then read.

Read as much as you can in the genre that you’re writing in. So that’s how I learned a little bit about thrillers, and because that’s not my nature, is not necessarily a thriller writer, but that was real helpful to me.

[00:34:52] Liz Booker: Well, that’s all great advice. Mary, is there anything else you wanted to share before we wrap things up?

[00:34:58] Mary Carroll Moore: I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I, I follow you on your social media and I’ve always been interested in all the amazing things that in your, your history as a pilot and all that. So it’s been a real honor to talk to you today, Liz.

[00:35:11] Liz Booker: Oh, same for me, Mary. And again, so grateful that you brought your writing expertise and your, your passion for your mom and her history to our Canon and contributed with this really great book that’ll be out on October 24th, but you can preorder it now.

And where can we find you?

[00:35:30] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, you can go with my website, marycarolmoore. com, that’s a great place to go, but if you go Amazon and just put in a women’s guide to search and rescue, you’ll get it. Goodreads is another place to look. There’s lots of places that it’s now available, Barnes Noble Bookshop. org. So pretty much all the online stores will have it and their pre orders are available.

There’s an audiobook, which is fabulous. The narrator’s so good.

[00:35:58] Liz Booker: Oh, congrats. That’s awesome.

[00:36:01] Mary Carroll Moore: She’ll, that’ll be out on Audible and all the other Spotify, everything like that. I love how she, she, I was in tears when I heard her read the book.

She’s so good. So, I’m gonna be winning. I really recommend

[00:36:14] Liz Booker: that has to be a great feeling as an author.

[00:36:16] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, it is. It’s like it’s real.

[00:36:19] Liz Booker: That’s amazing. Congratulations. Well, good luck with the book. I think we’ll be seeing more of you, I’m guessing, because I’m so excited about this book. I can’t see not doing it in the book club.

So we’ll see if it comes out on next year’s list or the one after because we have so many books to choose from and only 12 months in a year, but I’m so excited about it and, you can also find it on the Literary Aviatrix website. I will be adding the links to bookshop. org because I want people to also have the option to buy from independent booksellers.

I’ve been exclusively an Amazon affiliate. For a long time, and I wanted to give people other choices, but that Amazon preorder thing is real. So,

[00:37:05] Mary Carroll Moore: yeah, it helps me out. So if you, if you have any interest in, I’ll be doing a good reads giveaway to in the early part of October. So you might get some free signed copies that way. If you want to participate.

[00:37:17] Liz Booker: Absolutely. We’ll follow you on Goodreads and all the places. Thank you so much, Mary.

[00:37:22] Mary Carroll Moore: Thank you, liz. It’s been a real pleasure.

[00:37:24] Liz Booker: Thanks so much for listening. As I mentioned, you can find Mary’s book along with over 600 other books on the market featuring women in aviation. at the Literary Aviatrix website.

I’ll be slowly adding bookshop. org links for you to give you options. It’s an affiliate site where I receive a small portion of the proceeds at no cost to you. So thank you for your support by shopping through the Literary Aviatrix website. I’d like to thank Michael Wilds of Massif and Krewe for his help in producing this interview and for his creative and technical support of all things Literary Aviatrix.

Blue skies and happy reading!