Lloyd Lofthouse is represented by the interviewer's Pump Up Your Book Promotion, an innovative public relations agency specializing in online book promotion.
As a field radio operator, Lloyd Lofthouse was a walking target in Vietnam in 1966. He has skied in blizzards at 40 below zero and climbed mountains in hip deep snow.
Lloyd earned a BA in journalism after fighting in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine. Later, while working days as an English teacher at a high school in California, he earned an MFA in writing. He enjoyed a job as a maitre d’ in a multimillion-dollar nightclub and tried his hand successfully at counting cards in Las Vegas for a few years. He now lives near San Francisco with his wife, with a second home in Shanghai, China. Lloyd says that snapshots of his life appear like multicolored ribbons flowing through many of his poems.
Lloyd is now the author of a brand new historical fiction, My Splendid Concubine. We interviewed Lloyd to find out more about his exciting new book and his life as a published author.
Thank you for this interview, Lloyd. Do you write full-time?
Thank you for asking me here. Yes, I do write full-time. However, it wasn’t always like that. I taught for 30 years. It was difficult to find time to write. There were days I got up at three in the morning to carve out a few hours to write before going to work. In the 1980s, I took writing classes out of UCLA and drove more than a hundred thirty miles each Saturday to attend those classes. That lasted seven years. Since I had to have material to share each Saturday, I made time to write. It wasn’t easy.
At what point in your life did you make up your mind you were going to become a published author?
In 1969, I heard Ray Bradbury talk at Citrus Community College in Azusa, California. Bradbury lit a fire and a desire to write that never died. Without that motivation, I do not think I would have kept at it.
What is your favorite book at the present?
Recently, I read Mozart’s Wife by Juliet Waldron. Waldron’s insight and the depth of the characters in her novel impressed me.
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