Lynne Curry

I started writing when I learned what words meant. It was a raisin bran cereal box that did it. Even though I read backwards (I was dyslexic), I was stunned to learn that people could communicate with others even without being physically present. The newspapers became a candy land of writing -- there was so much there and I wanted to be in them. Despite being died-in-the-wool shy, I started carrying my poems to my town’s newspaper office and leaving them in their mail slot.I was eight when the newspaper surrendered and published my first poem. I was hooked!Before and after college I dreamed of becoming a full-time writer. I sent my poems and one awful play to every publication I could find. The desire to eat convinced me to get a day job and to go to college, though I used that play to substitute for a formal college application. They gave me a full-tuition scholarship, no doubt for chutzpah. I still loved newspapers and reading Ann Landers, Amy Van Buren and Mike Royko’s columns convinced me I could write an advice column. I wanted to change the world and was convinced that words were a powerful way to do that.“The Workplace” started in the Anchorage Times, then was picked up by the Anchorage Daily News, the Tri-city Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, the Morris Daily Herald and a small Vancouver-based syndicate. Although it started out a narrative column, after six weeks in the ADN, the editor called me and said there was a packet of mail waiting for me. Readers liked the column and had written me questions, which created the current “dear Abby of the workplace” approach. The best of these columns are published in Won By One and Solutions, still available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Along the way, I wrote Managing Equally and Legally, McFarland, 1990 and 200 articles for a wide variety of business, trade, women and teen magazines.Fiction still tugs at me. I’m a third of the way through a novel on internet dating scams, have written two short stories and had a memoir published in Anchorage Remembers.On July 17, 2014, I wrote a one page query for Beating the Workplace Bully and sent it to 7 agents. One wrote back within the day and two others within the week. All three liked the proposal I wrote and I went with the agent who first wrote me; within six weeks we had offers from six publishers and AMACOM is releasing the book in January of 2016; Brilliance Audio has the audio rights. What do I need now? Readers:)