Today we have author Maggie Lyons who just debuted her first children’s contemporary chapter book, Vin and the Dorky Duet from MuseItUp Publishing (eBook) and Halo Publishing International (print). When I asked Maggie Lyons to share a bit about herself she said, “Well, I don’t want to alarm your readers so I won’t tell them about the time I was a spy for the British government. No kidding. I really was—a very informal one—but that’s another story.
I’m sorry to say, I didn’t ask Lyons to share more on that as I was worried for my family’s wellbeing. However, later in this spotlight interview you will find her contact information and are free to write her about it. However, I did learn Maggie Lyons was born in a Welsh coal-mining town and brought up, very properly, in England, where she became an exceptionally boring child, always reading and practicing piano. Well that is how she tells it anyway:
"I had no idea who the famous pop singers were. I only knew about dead European composers like Mozart and Chopin. When I was pushed into adulthood, I zigzagged my way through a maze of professional environments, managing orchestras, writing concert program notes—one of my favorite jobs—and trying to appease a troupe of ballet dancers, which has to be an oxymoron. After beavering away in marketing and media relations in the completely unrelated fields of coffee and law, I finally settled down to have fun with red ink as an editor for an academic publisher. When I ‘retired’ I became a freelance editor and discovered the joy of writing for children.”
If you call that a boring life, I would love to see what Lyons considers adventurous. Lyons originally became a writer by default and said with no regard for the well-being of her family she trained as a classical pianist, subjecting all around her to four hours of practice a day. “I suspect the pterodactyls that landed in my stomach before public concerts had something to do with not taking up a career as a concert pianist," she says. "Instead, I found myself learning how to put rear ends on concert hall seats, otherwise known as orchestral management.”
Her first job in that heady field entailed writing the program notes for the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC. Lyons said it was a job made in heaven:
“I wallowed in the music section of the Library of Congress and luxuriated in the incredible privilege of being allowed to take books home to read. The research was as much fun as writing the notes, if not more so. My job was to write such compelling notes about the music on the concert program that audiences would actually want to read them before scanning the donor lists to see who may have donated more than they had. I had to balance the light—what the composer liked to eat for breakfast, and so on—with the heavy—how the musical composition was constructed. The job was an extension of what I had enjoyed studying at college, but now I was being paid to do it. Try beating that.”
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