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April 2, 2022: Launch for Ancestors

My first novel, Ancestors, took many years to finish. I started writing in 2007. The characters and plot evolved over time. I would often set it aside for months, then go back to it. The evolving manuscript became like an old friend. Always there, always happy to see me back again.
The plot and characters are based on many elements in my life over that time:

An immigration case from Nigeria.
My work with dreams in my private psychotherapy practice.
My dissertation: A Labyrinth Matrix Model of Working With Dreams in a Clinical Setting
Characters based on people I know, or wished I knew, or made up.
I found I have a knack for describing psychopaths.
Friends and family have hinted that there are clearly parts of me they never knew!
Ongoing research: people, places, cultures, religions, ghosts, spirits, food, and lots more.

Most of all, the fun of making up and putting together characters with secrets that surface leading everyone to an unpredictable, inexorable end.
Cover Art for Ancestors, a book by by Jan C. Thorpe
Since Ancestors, I have written four more books using six of the same characters including two Chows named Juno and Dido (the Queens). Ancestors is now the first in the ongoing series. All plots start in Berkeley with my band of intellectual eccentrics:
Gertrude, 80-year-old analyst;
Rebecca, psychotherapist and Gertrude’s protégé;
Rebecca’s husband Richard, professor of Cultural Anthropology;
Bear, Richard’s college friend, former Special Ops turned detective;
Rebecca’s sister Chows, Juno and Dido.
My stories have a theme of fatal reckoning. All use dreams, spirits, and ghosts, bringing in the element of magical realism. I like putting unlikely people together under circumstances that force them to interact to survive using their wits.
Everything to do with the creative writing aspect of giving birth to stories within stories within stories is fun for me. However, when my editor confronted me with a dose of reality by asking when and how I thought I might publish, I entered the Kingdom of Doom, or The Chamber of Delights or Self-Publishing. This entrance was rather like the beginning scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones enters the booby-trapped Peruvian temple with its sticky cobwebs, spiders, deadly decoys, rigged pitfalls and careening boulder from hell.
Many of you may think I exaggerate. But as we say in my other profession as a psychotherapist: “That’s how I feel!”

Writing is fun for me. Promoting my books is another kind of endeavor I will call a challenge.

I started by sending out the manuscript for Ancestors to publishers and quickly found out that I had a better chance of winning the lottery. For a gazillion reasons, which I will not enumerate, I chose to self-publish.

Last year I decided to do what everyone says to do when you have finished and edited your first book. A Launch! On April 2, 2022, I staged a book launch for Ancestors at my house. It was still Covid time and people were just beginning to trickle out a little more. It was fun and nerve-racking like any party. More than half the guests joined by Zoom, and about twenty, including my family, were there to eat, drink, and celebrate the launch of Ancestors.

Since it was Covid time, I hosted the launch at my home. I pulled together my team (family, editor, sister-in-law graphic designer and book designer, website facilitator, and all my wonderful beta readers who read Ancestors and gave me feedback), sent out invitations with the program to either come in person, or join by zoom. A friend hosted. I spoke and was interviewed by Cork Marcheschi, a wonderful artist who, unlike me, seems to know everyone.
My editor, Carol Burbank spoke. Karen Sketch, my wonderful and talented sister-in-law and I talked about our process together designing the book covers. After the program, we ate, drank, and toasted my achievement.
BUT. . .

Getting the book out into the public requires much more than putting it up on Amazon. This involves creating a professional website, offering paperback, hardback, eBook, audio book; finding the right social media platforms; sending out for reviews and contests; finding niches; writing plot synopses, promotional blurbs; navigating sites like Goodreads, Smashwords, Bookbaby, Book Tok; keeping up with the changes in where to promote (what’s out, what’s in, i.e., Facebook out, Instagram in); defining a book’s genre; using multiple words to describe the plot for a diversity of readers; writing professional blurbs, blogs and blueprints for success. The list not only goes on and on – everything changes.
Writing is fun for me. Promoting my books is another kind of endeavor I will call a challenge.
I’ve decided that my book launch was most important for me to recognize that writing, editing, researching, creating memorable characters with twists and turns in their lives that fit the plot with stories within the story, that end with an unpredictable thrill is an achievement to be celebrated with all one’s supportive readers.
Enjoy watching this video of the April 2, 2022 launch of Ancestors.

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