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Heart Soul COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Volume 11 No. 1 Northern State University Spring 2013 Like many people, she always wanted to write a book. She penned a rough draft of one while attending college and then put it away. After graduating from Northern, she moved to West Virginia where she had found a job. She had not been formally hired, but had gone through the interviews and was told that she could count on the job. After she had moved, she was let go before she ever had her first day of work. Apparently, cutbacks were to blame. Unemployed, and forced to move back in with her parents because she suddenly had no income, she thought about her options. At that point, she had rediscovered the draft of her first novel. With nothing else to do, she took an advanced writing course and completely rewrote the book. Many publishing houses rejected her manuscript, but then she considered the self-publishing industry. With nothing to lose, she took the plunge and in 2011 she published her first novel, Legends Lost: Amborese, under the pen name of Nova Rose. “But publishing is easy,” says McNulty. “Marketing is the hard part.” As a self-publisher, she is responsible for getting the word out about her books. This is where social-networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook come in handy. “You could say that I fell into writing,” McNulty says, reflecting on the circumstances of her becoming an author. “The inspiration for my books comes from everywhere. I have a novel coming out in June, Dystopia, which was partly inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the last election. But most of my inspiration comes from my experiences in life and places I have lived.” The sense of a place is what partly attracted McNulty to NSU. She decided to attend Northern because the tuition was affordable and she liked the small- town feel of Aberdeen. She didn’t intend to be a history major. She was going to change it, but Dr. Ric Dias found out about that and changed her mind. “It is a good thing I stuck with history,” she says. “Much of what I learned there, I used to write my grandfather’s memoirs ( Grandpa’s Stories: The 20th Century as My Grandfather Lived It ). Also, all of those twenty-page term papers forced me to write, which in turn developed a skill that is sorely lacking in our modern society.” Now the thought of writing 100 pages is not so scary to her. “Compare that to the first time I was told to write a term paper,” she says. “Besides, after writing a 1,200 page fantasy epic, split into three books, you can write anything.” Alumni Corner A setback in professional life sometimes turns out to be serendipitous. Ask Janet McNulty, an NSU History Program graduate. “You could say that I fell into writing,” McNulty says, reflecting on the circumstances of her becoming an author. “The inspiration for my books comes from everywhere.”