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laramie at 04:03pm on 27/01/2020
laramie at 04:03pm on 27/01/2020Nancy Holland
Today I learned that Nancy Holland passed away over the weekend. I'd been meaning to visit her. I knew her health was failing. My attempts to make direct contact had not been answered and I later heard from a mutual friend that she was no longer online. Somehow I failed to make a priority of getting in touch with her husband to find out where she was staying, and so make arrangements for a convenient time to visit. Now it's too late.
Nancy J. Holland was Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Hamline University. Her most recent books include "Ontological Humility: Lord Voldemort and the Philosophers' and 'The Madwoman's Reason: The Concept of the Appropriate in Ethical Thought.' But we never talked much about her serious non-fiction books.
We participated in a writing critique group together for years... ten years? And the books we discussed were her short contemporary romance fiction and my fantasy-romance novels and short stories. We shared feedback on each others' work and on the work of our fellow critique partners, Lizbeth Selvig and Ellen Lindseth.
During many of those years I was in tenuous financial straits and lacked a car, but Nancy was always ready to let me ride along with her to our meetings and we shared many of our conversations during those rides.
I acted as a sounding board for her ideas about future projects and the state of her career, and shared my thoughts on my own projects and career. Nancy impressed me with her practical approach to learning about the market she aimed to reach with her books. She studied her industry. She impressed me with her productivity and work ethic, with how much she accomplished. Most of all she impressed me with her generosity.
Not only was she always perfectly willing to indulge me with stops at Aldi or Trader Joes - so I could pick up a few groceries and save myself the hassle of shopping via bus - she was just as ready to help me find a market for my books as to research and work to reach her own. It's thanks to her that I heard about a call for stories about super heroes and wrote my first Team Guardian novella. (It wasn't chosen for the anthology that put out the call, but I later found another home for it, probably following up a lead from Nancy.) It was thanks to Nancy that I heard about a pitch contest at Lyrical Press, which eventually led to the publication of my fantasy novel,'Wonder Guy.'
Nancy commissioned me to build and maintain her first authorial website. I was happy to help her with the project and keep it updated through the publication of her first few romance novels, even adapting it later to include a small-screen version. This was an act of generosity on her part. She could undoubtedly have used a service to pull together a site using premade templates, but she wanted to help me out when I was struggling, letting me put my education in website design to good use, and I was happy to make something customized to reflect her California girl background and her message, 'Always Trust in Love.'
While I am glad that Nancy fulfilled her dearest dreams in seeing her novels and her fantasy Witch King trilogy published before her death, I can't express how sad it makes me, knowing that she has left this world, that she will write no more books, that we will never again ride together through the Minneapolis streets and over the highways sharing long conversations about the imaginary people we have cared about...
https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Holland/e/B00X65T9XK%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
Today I learned that Nancy Holland passed away over the weekend. I'd been meaning to visit her. I knew her health was failing. My attempts to make direct contact had not been answered and I later heard from a mutual friend that she was no longer online. Somehow I failed to make a priority of getting in touch with her husband to find out where she was staying, and so make arrangements for a convenient time to visit. Now it's too late.
Nancy J. Holland was Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Hamline University. Her most recent books include "Ontological Humility: Lord Voldemort and the Philosophers' and 'The Madwoman's Reason: The Concept of the Appropriate in Ethical Thought.' But we never talked much about her serious non-fiction books.
We participated in a writing critique group together for years... ten years? And the books we discussed were her short contemporary romance fiction and my fantasy-romance novels and short stories. We shared feedback on each others' work and on the work of our fellow critique partners, Lizbeth Selvig and Ellen Lindseth.
During many of those years I was in tenuous financial straits and lacked a car, but Nancy was always ready to let me ride along with her to our meetings and we shared many of our conversations during those rides.
I acted as a sounding board for her ideas about future projects and the state of her career, and shared my thoughts on my own projects and career. Nancy impressed me with her practical approach to learning about the market she aimed to reach with her books. She studied her industry. She impressed me with her productivity and work ethic, with how much she accomplished. Most of all she impressed me with her generosity.
Not only was she always perfectly willing to indulge me with stops at Aldi or Trader Joes - so I could pick up a few groceries and save myself the hassle of shopping via bus - she was just as ready to help me find a market for my books as to research and work to reach her own. It's thanks to her that I heard about a call for stories about super heroes and wrote my first Team Guardian novella. (It wasn't chosen for the anthology that put out the call, but I later found another home for it, probably following up a lead from Nancy.) It was thanks to Nancy that I heard about a pitch contest at Lyrical Press, which eventually led to the publication of my fantasy novel,'Wonder Guy.'
Nancy commissioned me to build and maintain her first authorial website. I was happy to help her with the project and keep it updated through the publication of her first few romance novels, even adapting it later to include a small-screen version. This was an act of generosity on her part. She could undoubtedly have used a service to pull together a site using premade templates, but she wanted to help me out when I was struggling, letting me put my education in website design to good use, and I was happy to make something customized to reflect her California girl background and her message, 'Always Trust in Love.'
While I am glad that Nancy fulfilled her dearest dreams in seeing her novels and her fantasy Witch King trilogy published before her death, I can't express how sad it makes me, knowing that she has left this world, that she will write no more books, that we will never again ride together through the Minneapolis streets and over the highways sharing long conversations about the imaginary people we have cared about...
https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Holland/e/B00X65T9XK%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share