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Overview
Judy Moffitt lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia and has lived there most of her life. At Longwood college, she majored in Political Science and minored in mathematics. She is now retired from a career in Data Analyst (which she did for the Navy), but has also been a sewer planner amongst other jobs.
Currently she lives with her two rescue dogs and when not writing likes to work with a local photography group and enjoys fractal art. In fact, some of her art is on permanent display at Longwood college match department.
Her Book
Her book is military science fiction involving a coup against the government.
Favorites
Some of her favorite books:
David Weber Honor Harrington series
Even though Judy doesn’t go to many bookstores, a favorite close to her is Prince Book Norfolk Virginia.
YouTube
Transcript
Stephen: Today’s discovered Wordsmith is Judy Moffitt, who has written a military sci-fi book, and this is after she’s retired. It’s a very fun talk. I enjoyed listening to her and finding out about all the different books that she’s enjoyed with sci-fi. We talked about quite a few of those. If you have been enjoying this, if you’ve discovered some new books that you enjoy, please go check out the authors.
That’s what this is for. I am trying to help authors introduce their work to more readers and help readers find some new books and new authors to support. If you want to help the podcast, help us out by giving us a light, giving us a review, that would help quite a lot. And now here’s Judy. Judy, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for taking some time to come on and talk with us.
Judy: It’s good to be here. I’m happy to come and talk. Good.
Stephen: So before we get started talking about your book, why don’t you tell us a little about, bit about who you are where you live, things you like to do outside of writing, that type of stuff.
Judy: I live in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and I’ve been here since 1978. Before that I grew up mostly in West Virginia. We moved there when I was seven. I attended Longwood College when it was a women’s college. I’m retired. I was a data analyst for most of the last probably 15 or 20 years in my career. Did a lot of other things before that.
My first job outta college, I was a sewer planner. Wow. Yeah. I lived with my boyfriend for 26 years, never married. He died 12 years ago, almost 13. I have rescue dogs right now. I have two Tina and Chico who are both Chihuahua mixes and if you. Happened. They’re in the room, so they might get whiny all of a sudden for some
Stephen: reason.
That’s not a problem. That’s the great thing. We can edit.
Judy: What else do I do besides write? What are I’ve been a, I’m an amateur photographer. I’m very involved with a local photography group. I do fractal art and Oh, cool. Of my art is in the Longwood. College permanent collection and is displayed in the math department, which is only appropriate.
Do you know what fractal art
Stephen: is? Yes. And it’s very lovely. How exactly do you do it? Do you use computers or are you freehanding
Judy: Fractal art that I do I use several different computer programs. Okay. For people who are listening that, dunno what it is, it’s mathematically based art that uses Fractal geometry equations to create the art.
Stephen: It can sometimes look like a kaleidoscope.
Judy: It can look like a lot of things. Fractal mathematics can be used to describe almost anything, any physical thing in the universe. You can, it can look like trees, it can look like flowers. It can look like like you said, kaleidoscope type of things. I have one that looks like a desert.
Oh, cool. They’re, so that’s, but it’s basically done through mathematics and I use a couple of programs, one called Ultra Fractal and one called J Wildfire.
Stephen: Yeah, I remember clear back in the day when I was younger, there was a video game that came out when they first started using fractal graphics for video games.
And it was like, that was the push. It was like, it’s totally different cuz we use fractal math to do the graphics instead of, just hand drawn vector drawings oh yeah.
Judy: Fractal map also is used for weather prediction and to map. Coastlines and all sorts of things. It’s used for a lot of things.
One, one of the things I find interesting about Fractal math is that when I was in college, I majored in political science, but I minored in mathematics. Wow. And that was before Fractal Math had been invented. It wasn’t invented until the 1980s, and I was in college in the 1970s. We, when I first started, we did not have calculators except really expensive ones that the math department owned that cost, I don’t know, $2,000 or so that Oh wow.
Did basic math. One of our, one of my professors quit, I think it was my sophomore year, to go work for Tex Texas Instruments. And we all thought he was crazy.
And then the next year they came down and priced to like a hundred, $150 to where that was reasonable.
Stephen: Yeah. Heck, now all my kids, when they were in middle school, they had to have a graphing calculator. That was just common. Everybody has to have one at, sixth grade.
Judy: We weren’t allowed to use
Stephen: them. Oh, you had to do it by hand? Yeah. Which, arguably I think is better. I couldn’t believe that all the kids were learning only how to do it on calculators, but I think
Judy: it’s better in the lower grades. But when you start to get to advanced mathematics, there’s no point in not using a computer or a calculator.
But, back in those days, we did it by hand. I’ve. Run. When I went to work as a management analyst working for the Navy, I actually occasionally ended up running regression equations for statistics by hand using calculus. Which I’d taken calculus, so I knew how to do it, but I never expected to actually be using it in real life.
Right.
Stephen: Probably having to do that probably turned a lot of people to some different degree and course in life,
Judy: Now we, I only did it a couple of times because we did have, we were, we did have a connection to a mainframe computer that we used. There were a couple of times when it couldn’t handle the equation.
I wanted to try. Wow.
Stephen: So you had a whole career before this and you retired. Why did you wanna start writing when you retired?
Judy: I, the book that I published, a Line in the Sand, I actually started in 2003, but I didn’t have time to write on it really, and concentrate on it because of work. I don’t know how many people, who work in the computer field like I was working in.
The hours can be excessive.
Stephen: Yeah.
Judy: I was often working 18 hour days or staying up all night till six in the morning so I could talk to our quality control people in India.
Stephen: I’ve had several 3:00 AM
Judy: polls book the energy left to so I had this book that had eight chapters that had been sitting there for let’s see, 2018, 15 years.
Wow. And so I wanted to finish it and you have to have something to do in retirement as things worked out with being locked in my house since last March. It’s probably a good thing I decided I wanted to write.
Stephen: Yeah. I’ve heard a lot of writers saying, huh, I, I don’t seem to be getting as much writing done as I would’ve thought.
And others like I have nothing better to do. Might as well start writing.
Judy: I have, since I retired, I have a process where I actually require myself to sit at the computer and work either writing or editing or whatever needs to be done now marketing for at least two hours a day. Oh, so
Stephen: gotta sit there and do the work.
I like that because that’s a discussion a group of us had. There’s the ones that say set goals and work toward your goals and others that say, just have a process and do your system, your process and it’ll work. You are definitely I have a process. I do it all the time and it’s accomplished two books.
I
Judy: learned. In all my various jobs, I worked on a lot of long-term projects. Projects that could last for several years or several months. And in that I learned that there is a process that you need to follow to get from start to finish and to not give up in the middle. And that helps me out with writing a lot.
So
Stephen: you mentioned your book, A Line In the Sand that was your first one. It took you a few years to do it, and now you’ve got your second one that’s coming out called To The Bitter End. By the time people listen to this, it should be out.
Judy: It’s out now. Yes. Today.
Stephen: Okay, great. So tell us about those books.
What are what are they about? What are the genres, that type of thing? A
Judy: line in the sand and to the Bitter end are part of a trilogy that I’m writing. And I’m working on the third one right now. They are science fiction. The premise is that there’s going to be a coup against the government. I swear to you, I decided on this before the events week.
There’s going to be a coup against the government and these various men who are not friends and who didn’t know each other before the start of the book. Find the clues to the fact that there’s going to be a coup. Unfortunately, they find it too late to prevent the coup from happening, but they decide that they’re going to organize a fight against these people who want to take over their government.
And so the first book is about drawing a line in the sand and saying, no, we won’t tolerate this. This is what we found. This is what we’re gonna do about it. And then it starts with the start of the war. The second book is The war’s been going on for six years and they’re losing, and people are discouraged and people are falling apart and people are dead.
And and it’s a very dark time and it goes through how they managed to get through that and how we end the war and that. Book basically ends with the end of the war. The third book is the aftermath of the war, putting the society back together, which is called Rising From the Ashes.
Stephen: Do you have any expectations on when that one will be out?
Judy: I’m expecting in the spring. I’m about 30%. Done it right now.
Stephen: Okay. And you said these are s thousand words on it yesterday. Nice. That’s a good amount. Yeah. So you said they’re sci-fi. Is this set like futuristic earth or is it another world?
Judy: It’s set in a lot of different worlds. It’s set in the coup. The government where the coup is taking over, is on earth, but they have a. Multi-plan government. It’s called the United Planets. There are also two alien races that get involved in the whole thing because the good guys need allies.
So they go to two other alien races and convince them to join in because it, this isn’t good for anybody in space to have this this coup. Okay and we end up on two different alien planets. We end up on a bunch of human planets. We have two main spaceships that we end up in. One’s a merchant ship and one’s a military ship.
Stephen: Okay, a question. Retired women. Retired women aren’t usually the sci-fi demographic. So what made you want to write a sci-fi book like this? Women
Judy: are a huge demographic in science fiction.
Stephen: Read, I
Judy: know I’ve read science fiction since I was 10 years old.
Stephen: Oh, I don’t disagree. I think I. Most people wouldn’t picture a retired woman writing a sci-fi novel.
Just
Judy: there, there are a lot of women who write science fiction novels. Yes. CJ Chara, Louis McMaster, Bojo. A lot of you know the biggest names in science fiction are women.
Stephen: Oh I’m not disagreeing. I was just trying to get out your thoughts on it, because I remember watching Star Trek way back when, and they had several names, like DC Fontana, and it was women writing it, but they had to use their initials because they thought people wouldn’t watch it or enjoy it if they knew it was a woman writing it.
Judy: So that’s true. In the 1960s that was true. Women were, and. One of those examples I just gave you. CJ chair. Yeah. She used her initials. Women became more able to come out as women in science fiction and be recognized as being women authors in the 1970s. And there’s probably, among the new authors, one of the big authors is Becky Chambers, and she’s, Can tell from the name she’s a woman.
The last couple of Hugos, most of the people nominated were women. There’re lot women writers
Stephen: in science fiction. I think. To the nerds and the sci-fi readers. That’s no real big surprise. I think there might be some non sci-fi readers that would be surprised at that. I love that more and more of those barriers are coming out.
The stereotypes are disappearing.
Judy: Yeah. Now the science fiction that I’m writing, Right now this particular trilogy is besides space opera, it’s also military science fiction. There’s a heavy military element of this of course, because we have a war and that is a space that is mostly male. Yeah,
Stephen: yeah.
Military. Get that testosterone going. The
Judy: reason why I wanted to write military science fiction is a, I love to read it. I was not in the military, but I worked for the military as a civil servant. And I grew up living on the grounds of a VA hospital, which is part of what inspired some of what goes on in this second book and the third book where I grew up seeing the aftermath of war.
I actually physically lived on the hospital grounds and saw the permanent patients who were there because they had what we would now call post-traumatic stress. But didn’t have that name back then. And they couldn’t handle being out in society. So they were permanently housed at the hospital and they wandered around all the kids, interacted with them.
It was nice, and even then, yeah, I was born in 1955, so my parents, my friends’, parents, all of the parents that we knew had gone through World War II in Korea. Most of the men, most of the fathers of my friends. Had served, many of them were damaged. They had either physical injuries or post-traumatic stress, although we didn’t talk about it then.
But my, one of my closest friends, her father had been a prisoner of war. And I would, I spent a lot of time at her house and he would come home from work and immediately go back into his bedroom and close the door. And my father was the same way. He had not, he’d been in the army in World War ii, but he didn’t go overseas.
He went overseas for Korea and spent his time. He was a doctor. He spent his time at a mass unit and I think, you know how awful they were.
Stephen: Not according to the TV show, they seemed funny. It’s still my, it’s still depicted
Judy: awfulness though.
Stephen: Yeah, it definitely did. For a comedy,
Judy: hundreds of patients and the death and destruction.
Stephen: Yeah, my grandfather was in Korean War. He didn’t talk a lot about it,
Judy: so that’s kinda where, in my own background, I wanted to write about aftermath. In order to have aftermath, you have to have some sort of an event. Like a what, or a disaster. The books are really more character based than anything else.
If you read a lot of the typical military science fiction, A lot of ’em are sort of action adventure and they don’t spend a lot of time on character and the best ones. Do you know? If you’re familiar with David Weber and His Honor Harrington
Stephen: Yep. Which I’ve had a few other authors mention that I’ve talked to.
Judy: Yeah. Dave he’s a really interesting guy. I’ve actually, I actually took a class from David. His advice in that class is what helped me write the battle scene in Nice. My book because even though I’m not really terribly into the technology and the David will spend 20 pages describing a weapon system, I don’t do that.
I just assume that we all know they have weapons than they work. I’m much more interested in what happens to the people than I am in the technology and
Stephen: which is I think great with some of the books and independent. Authors is an a traditional publisher, an agent, they may have wanted certain things.
They wanted cookie cutter, they wanted, you gotta get more description there, you gotta get more of this. Whereas now we’ve got authors that say, yeah, I’m not as big on the technology, but I really like the characters. But it’s still military sci-fi. And there are people that like all all the different types.
Some with more, some with less, and they may, you may be able to find your audience, even if it’s not what the quote unquote traditional publishers may have liked or recommended.
Judy: I find it interesting that if the people who have read it, which to be honest, is mostly people I know, not all though, I’ve actually.
Thank goodness for Kindle Unlimited, which gets your book out to Yes. Lots of people that you don’t know. But a lot of the people who read it were not science fiction readers, and they read it because I was their friend. And then they were all like, oh my God, I didn’t think I would like this. That’s good.
And they were just so surprised at science fiction didn’t have to be. All about shoot ’em up. And
Stephen: Again, we go back to the stereotypes. They picture the military sci-fi, it’s a bunch of guys talking about shooting. It’s kinda like a outer space hunt. Book and it’s not, and like you said, there’s a lot of women that write.
I think we get those stereotypes in our heads. The opposite of that is sometimes people get a little freaked out by guys that write romance. It’s oh my gosh, a guy can’t write a good romance, but they’ve been reading books by men, romance writers, without even knowing it because it’s just, TL Smith or something.
Yeah,
Judy: it’s the same thing. And and if you think about that in romance terms, a good number of romances do have a male main character. Yeah.
Stephen: Right.
Judy: Romance isn’t really my gig. I can see, particularly in these times, some of the book groups I’m in, people are always coming in and they just want something that’s light and fun.
And where the stakes aren’t. Tremendous and romance fits to that bill really well. Those
Stephen: are personal stories. I just wrote a little something. There’s
usually
Judy: not, bombs going off and. Natural disasters
Stephen: and not usually. Yeah I just wrote a little something about that. How with all the stress, the covid, all the political things going on that really writing fantasy is helping because people need that escape.
They need the forgetfulness of reality. They need something that entertains them and lets them de-stress and all forms of. Fun entertainment, sci-fi, fantasy, romance it gives people that escape and lets them relax and de-stress. So it’s actually, I feel very important to have these type of stories and books available.
It
Judy: really is, especially right now. And, fantasy is another realm I write in. I have two. Manuscripts and fantasy that I’m in the process of doing the editing on one. I’ve finished the second draft and the other, I’m about 80% of the way through the second draft, and then I’ll spend some time polishing them.
I expect to publish those probably around late February, March, April
Stephen: timeframe. Nice. Wow, so you’re pretty busy.
Judy: So I haven’t even talked about all the ones I have in process.
Stephen: We could get to those and I actually, one of the funny things is that I I, I want to have people back on after a year or so and see what their new books are about what their News stories and writing what they’ve been up to.
I wanted to jump back real quick. You said you were in Kindle Unlimited. Have you gotten feedback from those or those readers and what they’ve said about your book, someone that didn’t know you at all?
Judy: I have gotten a little feedback from people who didn’t know me at all. And it’s all been relatively positive.
I’ve gotten feedback from some people who,
Don’t know me as a person, but we were in the same group on Facebook. Who’ve read the book, and I got a really nice review on Goodreads from somebody I didn’t know at all. Nice. So I was like, wow,
Stephen: that makes you feel good. I dunno. Read my book. Yeah. It’s very validating. Wow. I wrote a good book that somebody likes it, gave them some entertainment for a few hours and,
Judy: And her review was like, And she made me cry twice and I hardly ever cry when I read a book.
I can probably pick out the points where I made her cry, but she didn’t specify. But I do have a scene where I killed off one of the characters. Cause you know it’s military science fiction, right?
Stephen: You. The first book I wrote my mother stopped reading it because I killed the girl’s parents.
She thought that was unacceptable and I shouldn’t have done that.
Judy: The interesting part about this character that I killed off, and it speaks to a lot of what it, what the process of writing has been about for me in this trilogy is that I was writing it, I was sitting here at my computer and the TV was on.
Which is right by my computer and CNN was on, and I look up and there’s a mass shooting happening while I’m writing a scene about a terrorist blowing up a ship and killing somebody. Oh man. And it’s happening in my hometown.
Stephen: Oh man,
Judy: on my
Stephen: birthday. So like you’re tapped into the, in
Judy: a building I’ve been in and where I knew people that worked there and I am writing
Stephen: Are you sure you don’t have some magic going on there that you like created reality?
Judy: What’s really we’ll get onto that. So I’m editing the second book about the coup. Polishing it up for its final publication today and what happens in the US government?
Stephen: You’re not the first author to write reality before it happens.
Judy: And then the third book I was writing about a scene where they’re trying the, doing court marshals, court’s marshal, I’ll get it right against. The people who committed the insurrection, and again, the TV is on and all of a sudden the FBI and the Justice Department are there talking about the people they’ve arrested and the trials they’re gonna have and what they’re gonna be tried.
I’m like, I really didn’t intend this to be so topical at the time. I started it in 2003.
Stephen: Nice. Jumping out of the bending of reality. You were mentioning some other favorite books and authors. You mentioned David Weber. What are some other favorite books and authors of yours?
Judy: David Weber is a favorite, of course.
CJ Chara is probably my favorite author of all time. She’s the best science fiction writer that has ever written science fiction in my opinion. Nice. Her book INE was the first book I ever read that had a character that reminded me of me. I was, when I read it. But she just, she has this amazing way of creating aliens who are genuinely aliens.
They don’t think like human beings. That was part of my inspiration for writing the aliens that are were in, that are in my book was to try to say, how can I make these aliens think differently? Other favorite authors? I love Louis McMaster Bojo. She’s got one of the greatest characters in fiction with Miles GaN.
I dunno if I pronounced that right.
Stephen: Yeah, I’m not sure sounds right.
Judy: But and he’s this great disabled character who refuses to be disabled and he’s just gonna power through everything and he’s just a wonderful character. So actually I guess I like the writers who were very character oriented.
I like in fantasy, of course, the very first fantasy I ever read was the Lord of the Rings. I’ve read it in 1965. I’ve read it 50 times since. Wow. At least I’ve read it at least once a year. Ever since. Yeah.
Stephen: I think, like every other author I talk to says, Lord of the Rings is one of their favorites.
Judy: It’s if you write in fantasy, it’s just, it’s like required reading.
But it’s part of why I fell in love with fantasy as well as science fiction was that particular book for a long time. Almost all fantasies were sort of imitators and fantasy has grown quite a lot in the last 20 or 30 years and it has gotten much broader, which I think is great because now you can have a fantasy that’s actually a police procedural.
You. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Marshall, Ryan Marca?
Stephen: No, it doesn’t ring a bell.
Judy: Oh my gosh. Gotta write, read his stuff. He is, he’s come up with this universe called Marade, and he’s written 12 books in it. And they’re in, they’re all in the same city of Marade, and there’s a group who is, there’s four different groups of people that he follows.
One are the cops. So there’s two detectives that he follows through their cases. Then there’s another. Guy who’s like a Batman character, who’s a vigilante, who’s trying to stop the drug trade. And then there’s a couple of another set of characters who are knights in an order. And then the fourth set of characters are they’re not really underworld exactly, but they’re not wealthy.
They have their Building, I think it was burned out of them, un from under them. And they start to commit capers to try to get to the guy that who destroyed their lives. Okay. So it, they’re it’s a caper thing. So it’s a fascinating universe because he has all these different pieces in play, but that’s nothing like the Lord of the Rings, and there, and and there’s fantasy now with vampires, which is not my favorite. And there’s, romantic type of fantasy and mystery type of fantasy and, all sorts of things that wouldn’t have been written in the sixties and seventies.
Stephen: Yeah. Like we were saying earlier, with independent authors, they can write s very sub genre and different niches and be able to reach an audience that appreciates that and likes that.
And you can pick and choose.
Judy: O one of the ones I especially like is in that respect is steampunk, which I put into fantasy that some people put into science fiction.
Stephen: I, I, yeah, it’s a little bit of both at times. Depends on the story.
Judy: I see it more as fantasy because a lot of the steampunk books I’ve read through in life has some sort of magical element, but b, I see science fiction as being about the future, but steam punk is about.
Alternative history. I see alternative history also as mostly fantasy as opposed to science fiction. And again, yeah. A lot of people put it into science fiction
Stephen: And personally I like the science fiction that could be classified as fantasy. That’s what Star Wars was. The people that get all upset how could they travel faster than light?
How could they do this? And I’m like it’s really cuz it’s a fantasy, you don’t argue that the big bad Wolf talked to Little Red Riding Hood before it ate her
Judy: there. There’s even, I always considered Star Wars to be space opera. Yeah, opera. We don’t care how we got there or why we got there, but we’re running around space doing
Stephen: things which arguably could be a sub genre fantasy.
Judy: Yes. And, but there is, there’s actually some books that I’ve read in, in the genre that are in fact definitely both there’s some where the starships are run by majors. So you’ve got science and magic together in the future in space.
Stephen: That sounds interesting. I’d like that.
Judy: Glen Stewart Star made series.
There’s also I, gosh, I can’t think of the name right offhand, but cuz I, it’s been like 10 years since I read them. There’s another one, I’ll have to look it up. I can tell you what it is. One of the things that I’ve done that I put out on Good Reads is I made a list of different kinds of science fiction to try to, I’ve talked to a lot of people who are like, oh no, I would never read science fiction.
I can’t think there’s anything in science fiction I wanna read, because they’re all certain it’s these, boys in space with guns and that it’s all aimed at teenage boys. But it’s not, I made science fiction reading list had talked about the various different kinds of science fiction.
There’s a lot of different kinds of science fiction that people don’t even think about, right? Because there are science fiction romances, for instance,
And fantasy romances. I’m gonna do the same kinda list for fantasy. I just haven’t done it because it’s a long time to build this. There’s what I call crime science fiction.
Wherever you go in the future, crime will still be with us. There’s still gonna be the need to solve crimes colonization, science fiction world building, the epic and scale things like dune books about meeting aliens. Post apocalyptic time, travel
Stephen: medical. I know especially today, that’s becoming more, people wonder, what should I do?
What should I choose? And the argument that’s not real science fiction. Or, this is, and that’s not I think it’s just we have so many choices now. And people aren’t looking for just science fiction. There are people that want the romance or they want the robot mech robots or whatever.
There’s just, yeah. There’s a
Judy: whole group of books about robots group of books that are concerned about the law in science fiction religion and science fiction, feminist science fiction generation ships traitors. Traitors is one of my favorites. Because the need for trade to things doesn’t go away in the future.
Quarter. Share by Nathan Lowell. Again, another one of my very favorite authors is just this wonderful book that is talk about something to read in a Pandemic. It’s just, hey, this 18 year old kid ends up on a merchant ship in space, and it’s his adventures. There’s no at least not till the sixth book, there’s no high stakes.
It’s just. Hey, you know what happens to me is I go from planet to planet on this ship, and in today’s world, I think we need more of that. I think in writing, we’ve gotten a little too much into the hero’s journey and the, the three act structure where you have to have this rising action to some really major action, and it’s not really what people are looking for right now.
Right now, a lot of times people aren’t, they just want to fall in love with a character and a universe and read about ordinary adventures and not have to worry about high stakes. Cuz life is too high stakes right now. And so that’s why books Quarter Share are great books for right now.
We do need to tone it back a little, and I say this as I write a book about a war. But I started it in 2003. I have a series in mind that I’ve just barely started. I only have a couple of chapters that’s gonna be about colonizing Oh, nice.
Stephen: And I,
Judy: about the ships that take people off of the dying earth to colonize planets.
And they keep going back and forth. And the real story is about the journey and what happens on the ship, and it’s going to be very low stakes. Other than the fact that they’re escaping Earth.
Stephen: And I agree with that. I have the same thought cuz I’ve got a series of books I’m working on where it’s mostly focused on just the adventures that these two characters go through.
Not a big overarching plot. And it’s mostly just a series of adventures.
Judy: Yeah. And I think we just need more of that right now. People don’t need to be. There, there’s some books in science fiction that deal with plagues, for instance. It’s just not the time to be reading them for most people.
Some people like that. They like to be able to read about plagues because I guess it comforts them that the idea is this could happen in other times in places and the people got through it. But a lot of people are very like no I need to think about something completely
Stephen: different.
Something just like we said, entertainment to stress relief, and there’s
Judy: humorous books. There’s a lot of really fun books that are just fun in science fiction. John Scalzi wrote a book called
Stephen: Red Shirts. Yep. That’s a great book. Which
Judy: is loosely based on the fact that the red shirts and Star Trek would be the ones to go down and get killed.
Stephen: Yep. My gaming group when we used to do a lot of RP G for Christmas, the one year the guy got us all lounge like long sleeve lounge jackets and they were the red star Trek. Shirts. And so we were like I’m not wearing that cuz then the DM will kill me off. Yeah. So Judy down with all these books you like, do you have any favorite bookstores down around where you live that you like to go to?
Judy: I read almost exclusively online nowadays. On, on digital nowadays because as it turns out, I’m allergic to books. Oh. Books collect mold. Once I, and I like to reread so I don’t read just new books. Once I converted, once I bought a Kindle and got my first digital book, I’ve bought hardly anything in actual paper ever since.
Okay. However, that’s fair. There is a great bookstore in the area called Prince Books. That is a very nice. Little independent bookstore. It’s in Norfolk, Virginia. And the people there are very friendly. They do support independent authors. They also have a restaurant so you can get food. I used to go there for lunch when I worked in downtown Norfolk.
Nice. Back in the day when I went to bookstores all the time, my boyfriend used to laugh at me and say that they had a chair dedicated to me at Barnes and Noble because I went there every Friday. That’s
Stephen: a good thing.
Judy: I kinda miss that. Yeah. But I really do reading on the Kindle better. I can have a thousand page book.
And it doesn’t weigh anything more than a 200 page book.
Stephen: Exactly. Yeah. I
just,
Judy: Which as you get older, it becomes a thing. I could change the font to a larger size if I needed to. I haven’t gotten to that point yet.
Stephen: Not quite that old. I can read on the Kindle even if I can’t find my reading glasses, which happens a lot.
Judy: I can take my whole library with me anywhere. When I was in my twenties, I had a job where I traveled and I would go away for four to six weeks at a time and I would, my half my suitcase was books because I not only read a lot, I read very fast. I read 400 words a minute. Oh wow. And so one of my coworkers one time was like, here, let me get that suitcase for you.
Stephen: Library. Oh yes. I,
Judy: Then I buy more books when I was out there, cuz I’d get through the, of course.
Stephen: So I’d take in with me. We always go to bookstores when we’re on vacation. So Judy, before we get, before we end the first half of our talk give us again, the name of your book and where to get it. And then also for the readers that are wondering if they should buy your book, tell ’em why they should buy your book.
Okay.
Judy: The name of the book, the first book is called A Line in the Sand. The second book is called To The Bitter End. The second book is a sequel to the first one, so you wanna start with the first one. They’re both available on Amazon. Probably trying to give you the Amazon address for something that’s not
Stephen: visual, doesn’t work.
I’ll find it and I’ll put a link in, show this about Judith
Judy: Moffitt, j u d i t h m o f i t, and you’ll see it. I think the reason that they should buy it is because if you’ve ever had to deal with trying to recover from something, even something, not something that’s world shattering, but just, somebody dying or.
An abusive situation or whatever. If you’ve ever had an aftermath in your life and you wanna see how other people cope, that’s part of why you might wanna read it. If you just like to meet characters that are interesting and people you wanna spend some time with, that’s another reason to read it. The book, both books are not all serious.
There’s humor. I try to hit a lot of things in talking about the war that’s ongoing in the second book. Life still goes on in a war, and I have this great scene in there where this couple who’s been separated because one is in the military and one is not, end up on the same planet together and have both those ships are being repaired, so they had a chance to have a vacation.
The first vacation they’ve ever had since all of this started, the first vacation their children have ever gone on. And so they’re off on this alien planet in a park and the kids are off hiking and this couple is, a couple happens to be trans, but that’s irrelevant to the scene. They’re just having this conversation about what they wanna do in the future and this, that, and the other.
And like any couple, they get into to getting silly and they start to tickle each other. And they’re laughing and they’re trying, they’re falling off the couch and their kid comes in standing there with their eyes wide open. It’s really a fun scene. So the, it’s not all sadness and tears and high stakes.
A lot of it is about, hey, ordinary life goes on while these things are happening. And so there’s a lot of that too.
Stephen: Great. Judy, I love the sound of this book and I hope a lot of people are interested in it. I can’t wait to see your second and third one and talk to you more about those.
So thanks for taking some time to talk with us and we’ll get going on the second half here in just a moment. Okay.