Online Feature

Julie Mars: An Author Any. Time.

by Pari Noskin Taichert

When Julie Mars moved to Albuquerque from New York 10 years ago, she wanted to escape “the work rat race” and slow down. She’d already sold her first book and planned to complete a comedic novel about the vagaries of coming to terms with middle age.

Funny how plans change.

Just two years after her arrival here, Julie Mars learned that her older sister was terminally ill. The author dropped everything to help.

“That was a kind of beginning to the circle,” Mars says. “The new book has a character who lingers between life and death because I found myself in that world.”

Each day, Mars read pages from the nascent manuscript to her sister.  “I finished the first draft just before she died. My sister said, ‘Your characters are the last friends I’ll ever make.’”

Filled with grief and loss, Mars put her latest work “Anybody. Any. Time.” on hold. How could she ever make sense of her sister’s death or understand her sibling’s religious faith? In order to do this, Mars took a spiritual journey. For 31 weeks, she attended a different church each Sunday and chronicled her thoughts. Though she never intended for these to be published, they became the foundation for a memoir, “A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister.”

The nonfiction book gained Mars national renown including selection by Barnes & Noble for the “Discover Great New Writers Series” and a nomination for the Independent Press Book Award in 2005.  

Yet the manuscript Mars had read to her sister lingered, nagged, demanded attention. It was fun and featured the adventures of a pistol of a woman who buys a dilapidated farm house in upstate New York.

“’Anybody. Any. Time.’ has a lot of comedy, and in a way it’s closing the grief of the second book, of the seriousness,” Mars says.

Greycore Press, a highly-respected independent, had published Mars’ first two works. The author had been delighted with her experiences there. However, the owner Joan Schweighardt decided to close the business.

This was bad news.

“As happens sometimes, my agent didn’t want to sell the new book,” Mars says, remembering the search for someone else to represent the manuscript.

Two agents expressed interest, but wanted changes. When the writer requested specifics, neither one returned her calls.

Mars told Schweighardt, who had become a friend, about her struggles. “Joan thought that was ridiculous and contacted some people herself. Sure enough, two editors at big houses bid on it.”

The winner was St. Martin’s Press, one of the world’s largest publishers.

“It was a beautiful thing, a dream come true. I got to go to New York and meet my editor. I even got to go for the swanky lunch,” says Mars, who now teaches full time in CNM’s English Department.

“Anybody. Any. Time.”was published in June of this year. Mars hopes it will inspire readers to embrace growing older.

“I want women, in particular, to come away from the book more sure that life opens up, instead of closes down, in middle age. And also, that intuition should be respected and acted upon.”

--Pari Noskin Taichert is the author of “The Socorro Blast,” the third novel in her Agatha-Award-nominated mystery series from The University of New Mexico Press. She is also the founder of the Anthony-Award-nominated Web site Murderati.com.