I would like to welcome Nancy Nau Sullivan to the blog for #ThisorThatThursday!

A few of your favorite things: I love my old wool slippers, daffodils, and hard rain

Things you need to throw out: I should dump my clothes closet (why did I buy this, and THAT!), all these Tupperware containers, and the contents of my garage.

Things you need for your writing sessions: a window, a second cup of coffee, and quiet; a big table to spread out my notes, or, if any of the kids are around, I need my bed, my computer on my lap, and the door
closed.

Things that hamper your writing: I create interruptions—I did not have to sit on the front step with the neighbor’s cat for an hour this morning, vacuum the living room for the third time this week, and open Facebook and Twitter (I call it the Twitter hole).

Things you love about writing: I love the bursts of creativity, wondering where in the hell that idea, character, twist came from. The hours go fast and end up on the page in my computer.

The things I hate about writing: I don’t hate anything about writing. I hate all the time spent trying to sell it—I’m no salesperson, I just want to write, but that’s not the way the world is.

Hardest thing about being a writer: I want to get it right. I’m a former newspaper journalist. I had a boss once who said he’d fire anyone who got an obit wrong—I can still hear him. “It’s the last damn time anyone will write
about him so you better get it right.” I spend hours and hours researching, going through notes, editing, editing, editing. Checking. On one of my drafts I found 200 misspelled compound words, and they needed to be fixed for consistency and correctness. Grrrrr. Should have done it right the first time.

Easiest thing about being a writer:
I know I’ve earned my place at the computer, and I love sitting there and writing
the story. And now I am free to do it! It’s completely on me.

Things you never want to run out of: time, and chardonnay

Things you wish you’d never bought: the nine hundred pairs of shoes and boots, and, yes, the lawn mower that has never been used

Words that describe you: tenacious, thorough, devoted and loyal, creative

Words that describe you, but you wish they didn’t: opinionated, hot-headed, at times anti-social. My best friend in high school once said to me: “You’re right and the world’s all wrong.” Well, she was only partially
right; I’m wrong a lot and so is the world.

Favorite foods: pizza, baked potato, porterhouse steak, fresh sourdough

Things that make you want to gag: beets tempura, okra, nopal, kale, the skin on a tomato, and especially,
bananas. I didn’t realize I was so fussy until I told my daughter-in-law I LOVE ALL FOOD. I don’t.

Favorite music or song: The Beatles, The Eagles, Andrea Bocelli, Chris Stapleton, The Avett Brothers, The Pistols at Dawn (my son’s rock group)

Music that drives you crazy: heavy metal and rap …I’ve tried to understand it, to like it, and I don’t. I sort of like A Tribe Called Quest.

Favorite beverage: beer—good old Miller High Life—and chardonnay—and lemon ginger tea
Something that gives you a sour face: all that craft beer that smells like watermelon, cotton candy, bubble
gum…really?

Favorite smell: jasmine, orange blossom, gardenia

Something that makes you hold your nose: musk

Something you’re really good at: writing and editing; remembering the names of books and their authors; sewing; pole dancing

Something you’re really bad at: directions, remembering song lyrics, public speaking (although I was a teacher for 15 years and I was very good at it. Still can’t figure that one out.)

Something you wish you could do: I want to go to Australia and New Zealand and back to Vietnam.

Something you wish you’d never learned to do: Nothing, I love learning—even that third-grade math when I substituted in the classroom last year.

Something you like to do: write, swim, walk, travel—I drive to Florida at least once a year by myself. I love it. I turn up the country music and eat popcorn for 1300 miles, gape at Kentucky and Tennessee and the gorgeous
red earth of Georgia, and then I’m there, on Anna Maria Island, my favorite place in the world.

Something you wish you’d never done: Besides smoking—I wish I’d never listened to my mother. I gave up a fellowship at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern, after undergrad. She insisted I “go into the market place.” I did. I finally got the master’s after my fourth son was born.

The last thing you ordered online: Books, books, books for my son who has started writing (Ann Lamott, Stephen King, Jessica Brody, all on writing) and for my nephew on his 50th birthday (Erik Larson’s new The Splendid and The Vile)

The last thing you regret buying: Another pair of boots. OMG. It’s the second pair this year, and I still go back to my old broken down ones with holes

Things you always put in your books: How the sun looks on the water, the trees, the stones and sand; the people—dedication and acknowledgement to those who helped me. I couldn’t do it without the generosity of so many beta readers, experts, editors, and publishers.

Things you never put in your books: porn, graphic violence, and profanity. Well, I had to resort to a bit of the latter in my prison saga, The Boys of Alpha Block, coming out next year from TouchPoint Press. It’s the way they talk, but I don’t think the language is gratuitous.

Things to say to an author: I love the way you do setting (or character, plot, description). Every author has a strong point, or many. Just tell them.
Things to say to an author if you want to be fictionally killed off in their next book: Will you review my books and give them all five stars, and will you do it now?

Favorite places you’ve been: Spain, New York, Anna Maria Island, Mexico, Ireland, Vietnam—so totally different and mind-blowing for so many reasons! My new mystery series that debuts in June with Saving Tuna Street will take Blanche Murninghan to Mexico City next, then to Ireland where she rents a castle, and on and on until she gets very tired and returns to her beloved Santa Maria Island (Anna Maria Island).

Places you never want to go to again: The boys’ prison where I taught English for five years. I wish we never had such a place, but we did, and I wrote about that, too, in The Boys of Alpha Block (TouchPoint Press, next year).

Favorite books (or genre): I love the Ann’s and Alice’s – Munro, Tyler, Patchett, Hoffman, Lamott, Beattie. They have a way of making the reader sit up and take notice and appreciate the world down to its finest, and sometimes regrettable, point. I love the police stories of Laura Lippman and the incredible description and characterization of James Lee Burke; so many—Sittenfeld, Allende, Semple, Amato, Harper, Moriarty, and all the books my cousin Charles sends me by new writers. I want to read more work by my Sisters in Crime. I read Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, a new novel by the Vietnamese poet. I almost fell out of my chair the writing was so gorgeous.

Books you wouldn’t buy: anything sci-fi except Ursula Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut

People you’d like to invite to dinner (living): My cousin Charles, my college roommate, Heidi, who I lived in Spain with, my good friend, Bobbi, an art teacher who I gossiped and smoked with so many years ago, Jamie Dimon (he’s reviled but he’s done some good stuff, too), Curtis Sittenfeld, James Lee Burke, and Alice Hoffman. I think eight is a good number for dinner.

People you’d cancel dinner on: I just wouldn’t go there. I know how to say no in the first place.

Favorite things to do: write, read, walk, travel, sit and watch the cardinals flit by the window. (I do too much of the latter.) I can’t wait for the hummingbirds to come back, and then I can waste more time daydreaming.

Things you’d run through a fire or eat bugs to get out of doing: Clean the oven. I actually ate bugs in Mexico—chapulines (grasshoppers) and they were pretty tasty and crunchy, but I don’t think I’d do it again.

Most daring thing you’ve ever done: Zip lining in Costa Rica—my cousin Kathy, the adventurous one, said, “What’s the worst that can happen?” As I looked 40 feet down through the tree canopy…

Something you chickened out from doing: Horseback riding, after falling off twice

The coolest person you’ve ever met: My dad, a funny, totally magnanimous Irishman who loved me unconditionally and believed in me

The celebrity who didn’t look like he/she did in pictures/video: Kiefer Sutherland—I met him backstage after a Broadway play. He was gracious, but sweating like nobody’s
business, and he’s very small.

The nicest thing a reader said to you: “I loved your book.”

The craziest thing a reader said to you: “I loved your book, but I had to find something wrong, so I gave it four stars.” My high school classmate. She’s still a card after all these years.

About Nancy:

Nancy Nau Sullivan is a former newspaper journalist and English teacher. She taught at a
boys’ prison in Florida, in Argentina, and in the Peace Corps in Mexico. She returned to the setting of her memoir, THE LAST CADILLAC, to write SAVING TUNA STREET, her first mystery. She lives in Northwest Indiana and, often, anywhere near water.

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