Welcome Today's Featured Author
Judith Works!
Coins in the Fountain
Innocents Abroad collide with La Dolce Vita when the author and her husband arrive in the ancient city of Rome fresh from the depths of Oregon. While the author endeavored to learn the folkways of the United Nations, her husband tangled with unfamiliar vegetables in a valiant effort to learn to cook Italian-style. In between, they attended weddings, enjoyed a close-up with the pope, tried their hands at grape harvesting, and savored country weekends where the ancient Etruscans still seemed to be lurking. Along the way they made many unforgettable friends including the countess with a butt-reducing machine and a count who served as a model for naked statues of horsemen in his youth.
But not everything was wine and wonders. Dogs in the doctor’s exam room, neighbors in the apartment in the middle of the night, an auto accident with the military police, a dangerous fall in the subway, too many interactions with an excitable landlord, snakes and unexploded bombs on a golf course, and a sinking sailboat, all added more seasoning to the spaghetti sauce of their life.
Their story begins with a month trying to sleep on a cold marble floor wondering why they came to Rome. It ends with a hopeful toss of coins in the Trevi Fountain to ensure their return to the Eternal City for visits. Ten years of pasta, vino, and the sweet life weren’t enough.
Part memoir, part travelogue, Coins in the Fountain will amuse and intrigue you with the stories of food, friends, and the adventures of a couple who ran away to join the circus (the Circus Maximus, that is).
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City of Illusions
Laura impulsively applies for a job in glorious Rome without telling her husband, Jake. She wants to leave gray Seattle and make her dreams of a more exciting life and a rejuvenated marriage come true. When the offer unexpectedly arrives she talks Jake into the adventure. After all, she is nearing 30 and Jake crossed that threshold only a few years earlier. Life might pass them by if they don’t take the chance.
But she and Jake soon learn la dolce vita is far more complicated than they imagined when they are catapulted into a world full of intrigue, deceit, and infidelity lurking behind the sunny piazzas and crumbling ruins.
Their lives spin out of control when naïve Jake, cast adrift as the trailing spouse, is sucked into a gang of antiquity thieves. Laura is left to find her own way the city of yearning, of echoes, of illusions. What will she do? Preserve her marriage at all costs or search elsewhere for the key to the happiness she desires?
In this woman’s fiction set in the romantic city of Rome, author Judith Works tells the classic tale of the Old World colliding with the New but with a modern twist.
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About Judith Works:
Life was routine until the author decided to get a law degree. Then a chance meeting led her to run away to the Circus (Maximus) – actually to the United Nations office next door – where
she worked as an attorney in the HR department and entered the world of expat life in Rome. Her publishing credits include a memoir about ten years in Italy titled Coins in the Fountain, a novel about expats in Rome, City of Illusions, and flash fiction in literary magazines. She continues to travel in her spare time, having fitted in over 100 countries. And when she is in Rome, she always tosses a coin in the Trevi Fountain to ensure another visit.
Website: www.judithworks.net
Facebook: www.facebook.com/JudithWorksAuthor
Twitter: @judithworks
Blog: http://aLittleLightExercise.blogspot.com
Instagram: WorksJudith
Interview With Judith Works:
1. Can you tell us a little about your books?I have two books published and both are set in Rome. The first is a novel, City of Illusions, the story of a young and naïve couple who move to Rome, thinking it will enliven their stale marriage. Life doesn’t go as planned when the husband becomes involved in art theft.
The second is my memoir, Coins in the Fountain. I had the good fortune to live in Rome for ten years while working for the United Nations. My husband and I had many adventures both happy and a few dangerous. We loved the food, wine and wonderful art and were sorry to leave Italy.
2. When did you know you wanted to write a book?One winter morning when it was pitch dark and raining in Seattle I woke up and looked at the clock. It said 6:00 A.M. That made me think that it was 3:00 P.M. in Rome and all my friends were finishing their lovely long lunch hour. And I knew then that I wanted to write about sunny Rome and all its joys and sorrows.
3. Do you work with an outline, or just write?I had a very basic outline for both books. For the novel, the characters took over and led their lives. For the memoir, I changed focus several times as the memories flooded back.
4. Do you aim for a set amount of words/pages per day?I don’t. I do try to write every day but I do need inspiration before the words flow. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and make notes (and sometimes when I get to work in the morning the ideas are good and sometimes they aren’t.
5. Which book has been your favorite to write?The novel was a challenge to develop characters and research art theft but my favorite is the memoir because it brought back so many wonderful sights, food, and friends who shared many of our adventures.
6. Do you have a favorite spot to write?I’m lucky because I have an office at home. I use a desktop. The walls are covered with paintings and posters from my travels around the world, the desk holds dictionaries, my Thesaurus and other reference material. And I have a bookcase filled with books about Italy, history, guidebooks, and novels. Sun comes in the window and when I’m taking a break I have a red leather couch to sit on.
7. Do you listen to music while you write?Yes, depending on my mood I listen to classical music or soft jazz.
8. What are you working on next?I’m working on another novel. This one is partly set in Italy and partly on an island near Seattle. And it involves blackmail and a murder! Right now
Thanks so much for the feature!
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