Published for the Yavapai Regional Medical Center Family

Vol. 24, No. 28

December 3, 2004

A post-apocalyptic event, a third world war, a fallout shelter, a family trying to survive, and a horse. These are the themes and characters of a newly published book by one of our own. Nance Sparks, Lead PC Tech in the IS Department, is eagerly awaiting the release on December 11 of her first novel. Always interested in writing, Nance has files full of short stories and articles she's written over the years, but when "A Choice to Survive" was finished she decided to take the chance and send it to a publisher. To her surprise and delight, they bought it.

Nance says the idea for the premise of the book is anchored in current events and research she did on nuclear energy in her senior year at DeVry Institute of Technology. "With terrorism and nuclear proliferation constantly in the news, the topic seemed to jump out at me," she said "and I already had a lot of the research done." Since she's an avid horsewoman, it was inevitable that a horse be a central focus for the story. People always tell you to write about what you know and in this case I very loosely modeled the family on my own and, of course, had to have a horse as a central character."

Writing has been a longtime interest for Nance. For fun in high school she and a group of her friends combined their ideas and wrote a story of corporate conflicts, espionage, power and corruption. More recently, she has also written on a wide variety of topics including the story of a spill on a bicycle fashioned on an event in her own life, the Appalachian Trail, and an argumentative paper written for the National Forest Service on preservation versus profit.

In writing, Nance says she doesn't take a lot of time coming up with a plot and characters. "The story just seems to unfold in my head and I then work to set up the background, scenery and dialogue. Sometimes I'm at work and an idea starts noodling around in my head. I try to put down a few key words so I won't forget them and write them down when I get home."

Available now at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, PublishAmerica and other booksellers, "A Choice to Survive" is written as a cliffhanger and Nance says she's already halfway through the sequel that she hopes also to publish.