By Michelle Lecumberry, Design Editor
“Writing is the one profession that you don’t choose. It chooses you. It’s like an itch you have to scratch. You don’t have a choice.” -Stephen King
The Rising
Heather Graham is a New York Times bestselling author. Jon Land a bestselling author of 41 novels. They collaborated to create a book called the The Rising. On April 7, during the Bayou City Book Festival. The pair participated in Lone Star College’s Bayou City Book Festival with a panel discussion on their careers, and their novel, moderated by LSC-Kingwood English Professor Icess Fernandez.
Fernandez read the summary of this book as;
“Twenty-four hours. That’s all it takes for the lives of two young people to be changed forever.
Alex Chin has the world on a plate. A football hero and homecoming king with plenty of scholarship offers, his future looks bright. His tutor, Samantha Dixon, is preparing to graduate high school at the top of her class. She plans to turn her NASA internship into a career.
When a football accident lands Alex in the hospital, his world is turned upside down. His doctor is murdered. Then, his parents. Death seems to follow him wherever he goes, and now it’s after him.
Alex flees. He tells Samantha not to follow, but she became involved the moment she walked through his door and found Mr. and Mrs. Chin as they lay dying in their home. She cannot abandon the young man she loves. The two race desperately to stay ahead of Alex’s attackers long enough to figure out why they are hunting him in the first place. The answer lies with a secret buried deep in his past, a secret his parents died to protect. Alex always knew he was adopted, but he never knew the real reason his birth parents abandoned him. He never knew where he truly came from. Until now.”
The Rising by Heather Graham and Jon Land. Photo by Michelle Lecumberry.
Defining a thriller.
Land said, “I think every book is a thriller, as long as it keeps you turning the page. It is the book that you can’t put down.”
Graham said, “A thriller– It doesn’t matter what genre it is in as long as it keeps you interested,”
The Rising is defined as a Young Adult, thriller and Sci-fi. Graham defines her book as a Young Adult.
Starting a writing career.
Land said, “I’ll talk about book negative one, because we are in a college. I wrote my first book as a senior thesis independent study project at Brown University. When I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I fell in love with writing because with Brown’s curriculum I was able to explore something different. The book was not very good it was terrible but the fact that I finished it and I learned from that because before you can be a published author you have to finish a book that can’t be published.”
After having her third child, theater major Heather Graham had a typing machine that was missing the letter “e”. Once she began writing, Graham later had to fill in the letter “e” herself. Being in a desperate mood, she got published by the unexpected Harlequin Publisher.
(Left to right) Author Jon Land, English Professor Icess Fernandez and Author Heather Graham at The Rising Thrill panel during the Bayou City Book Festival in LSC-Kingwood. Apr 8 . Photo by Michelle Lecumberry
