lcasella2014

MY ONLY BOOK PUBLISHING STORY, SO FAR By Lynn F. Casella I'm a published journalist, technical writer, and fiction author, as well as an accidental publisher. My father’s manuscript about Alaskan landscape painter Sydney Laurence was found by KAKM TV in Anchorage, AK. To prove ownership by the family and that indeed it was written in my father’s own hand, I identified his handwriting. At the time of its discovery, a television movie and a 120-painting tour of Laurence’s work toured west coast museums (Anchorage to Palm Springs). I published the manuscript as an accompanying book to be sold in the tour’s museum gift shops. I worked with an ad agency known to me when I did hospital marketing (1986-91) as Director of Fund Development Communications, Hoag Hospital Foundation (Newport Beach, CA), and Market Communications Manager, San Antonio Regional Hospital (Upland, CA). I sold the first half of the printing of 2200 books in one day. THE MAN AND THE MOUNTAIN: Sydney Laurence’s Mt. McKinley by Cyrus Peter Francisco sells for $14.50 www.amazon.com As Lynn F. Casella Communications, I am the book’s editor/publisher. My father (deceased since 1972) was a secretary/apprentice to Laurence (I own three of Laurence’s wife, Jenny’s, birch bark paintings). The rest of Laurence’s paintings are on display in the Anchorage of Museum of History and Art and in private homes. My father met him in Echo Park, LA, when my father was a civil engineer for the city. Cyrus Peter Francisco helped build the first telephone line to Vegas and wrote an article about collective bargaining in the L. A. City Civil Engineer magazine which prompted his firing. At that time, public employee labor unions were not a popular topic with bosses. Currently, as an author, I'm querying agents with my first completed thriller manuscript, THE DON'S WIFE and am two-thirds finished with its sequel LADY DON. Shamus Award-winning author Lynn S. Hightower is my editor. I married into a Sicilian American family who picked and shipped Cucamonga Zinfandel wine grapes for the number two man in the Los Angeles MAFIA. While that experience fuels THE DON’S WIFE and LADY DON’S plot and characters, the historical ecological threat to California wine grape vineyards also plays a role. Sarina Donato, threatened by her father’s murderer also seeks revenge, but to do so must engage in high stakes extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar agricultural fraud. I earned a UCLA Writers’ Program Certificate: Fiction.