Knoch grad pens her 1st novel
Maybe it's fitting that a Knoch High School graduate's first novel, which is being published as a print-on-demand book, began as a series of e-mails.
Jody Brown's “Upside Down Kingdom” is the semi-autobiographical story of a young woman named Amy working her first job after college and moonlighting at a Washington, D.C., restaurant between 2000 and 2002, the years of September 11 and the Beltway Sniper.
Brown lived in Saxonburg, graduated from Knoch and then the University of Pittsburgh in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in poetry writing.
Brown said she went to work at French & Co. a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm.
“I was sort of like the office manager at first,” she said. “They figured out that I could edit very well. We were a small group, we wore many hats. I also did the payroll.”
Brown began editing trade publications for French & Co., a task for which her poetry background had prepared her. “You have a limited space to say what you want to say, it's all about word choice,” she said.
At the same time, she was also waitressing, first at a Virginia coffee shop, then at a restaurant in the capital's trendy Dupont Circle neighborhood “just like Amy does in the book.”
“It was my own love letter to Dupont Circle, I loved it there,” Brown said. “When you are there, it really does accept you as one of its own. Show up as you are and you are in. It changed the way I look at the world.”
But it wasn't just lobbyists and the bohemian types of the trendy Dupont Circle Brown experienced, there was also the attack on the Pentagon and the Beltway Sniper shootings the next year.
Before the attack, Brown said, “We were all just kind of lighthearted. We really didn't pay attention to a lot of things. The biggest thing everybody was talking about was the disappearance of Chandra Levy.”
“Afterward, the day itself was eerily calm. You expected circus animals to be running through the streets, but it was calm,” she said.
After Sept. 11, she said, the mood in the capital was melancholy.
“You were afraid to laugh, afraid to be happy. You felt guilty that you didn't pay attention,” she said.
The sound of laughter was shocking, and people were calling home all the time, Brown said. She remembers everybody seemed to have allergies that fall, coughing and sneezing. People attributed it, rightly or wrongly, to debris from the Pentagon attack drifting through the air, she said.
The sniper attacks the next year were frightening, and when a woman was killed at a nearby Home Depot that Brown had visited earlier in the day, she knew she had to leave.
Brown moved to Rochester, Minn., where she had friends and where she figured the snowfall totals would keep her inside and keep her on target to finishing her book.Brown said while “Upside Down Kingdom” has autobiographical elements, some of the incidents are fictitious and some of the characters are a blend of two, three or even four real people.“Amy, this character's first job out of college goes to the big city and has to deal with disillusionment,” Brown said.“She's kind and mild-mannered and treated badly by a crazy co-worker and her roommates,” she added. In order to get away from her apartment, Amy takes a job waiting tables “and really finds herself in that, finds friendship in that, behind the scenes at the restaurant.”Brown said the novel “started as an e-mail to a friend of mine. I wanted to explain to her what it was like to work in Dupont Circle. I wanted her to really get it, to see it through my eyes.”“I just read through my sent box, just found little snippets of things, a lot of it was the feel, before and after Sept. 11 and when the sniper was loose. This is how it felt, this is what it was like, this is what we did to get through the day,” she said.It took her almost a year and a half to finish, she said, writing for three months at a time, then taking three months off.After editing and re-editing it, she sent it to two publishers and 30 agents only to have it rejected by all.That's when she decided to pursue the print-on-demand option. In November, she attended a seminar on the subject that inspired her to edit “Upside Down Kingdom” one last time and send it to Xlibris.com for publishing.Brown said for a fee Xlibris prints and ships a book each time one is ordered and got “Upside Down Kingdom” listed on BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com for downloading into Kindle and Nook e-books.“We have whatever the author needs,” said Keith Ogorek, the senior vice president of marketing for Author Solutions, the holding company of Xlibris.com. “We offer all forms of editing and illustration, e-book formatting, a full range of marketing services and distribution.”“I really just needed to get it into the hands of people,” Brown said. “The company prints the book, that was a huge hurdle done. Now it turns into marketing.”Brown said she is selling the book at the Rochester restaurant where she works and is making plans to sell it at a jewelry store and art gallery. It's also available as a physical book at a Barnes & Noble store in Rochester, as well as an e-book at Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com.“She's always written poems,” said her mother Sandy Brown, who lives in Saxonburg with her husband, Bob. “She would write down stories, things that she's heard. She has a fantastic memory.”“We're not surprised she wrote a book, but it's awesome that she got it published,” Sandy Brown said, adding she is reading “Upside Down Kingdom” for a second time.
