Author Spotlight: Colleen McCullough and More

I'm starting an Author Spotlight feature and I will be making some notes at the end of this.

Author Spotlight Week 1

For my first author, I've chosen Colleen McCullough. I just finished reading The Thorn Birds the other day. In addition, Colleen died at the end of January and has been in the news recently.

Colleen McCullough was an Australian author who is best known for The Thorn Birds and being a  romance novelist. When she first started writing, she had established the neurophysiology department at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, as well as being a neurophysiological researcher at Yale for ten years and would write in her spare time. She was often criticized for supposedly basing her characters off of other books. However, Colleen always stated that she wouldn't copy off other authors' works. Altogether, she would end up writing 25 novels in her career. Colleen passed away on January 29, 2015 at the age of 77 and leaving behind her husband Ric Robinson.

Colleen was known for sexist and lude writing, which was joked about in an obituary that an Australian newspaper published right after she died. Here's my take. Sex scenes in books/movies sells, there's no denying it. And the romance genre is above love making and sex of course. I've actually read authors who were more descriptive and provided more detail than what Colleen did in The Thorn Birds.

The Thorn Birds. Since the characters in the book were Catholic, this brings up an interesting point. Father Ralph was a priest, but still had feelings for Meggie and vice versa. It goes to show that nobody in any given vocation or career is perfect. Priests have to go to confession just like everybody else who believes in God. I am a born and raised Catholic myself. In recent years, I admit that I've fallen a bit out of my faith and that's okay too. It's okay to question anything and everything, including religion/faith. I hope and pray that someday I will get back fully into the Catholic faith. I'm not going to get into why I've lacked faith over some years because the issues are personal and I will figure out some way to deal with those issues and move on. I do believe in God and most of the Catholic faith; it's only little things and I know I'll get through it by trusting in God, among other things.

Second chances in life are acceptable and maybe someone thinks they would like to be in a certain profession/career/vocation/calling, only to find out that once they are, they don't care for it like they originally thought. It's like Maria in the Sound of Music. Maria thought she wanted to be nun, but couldn't really get into their rules/way of life and fell in love with a man instead. I knew someone in high school who wanted to do anything and everything to do with horses. When she went to college for it, she found out she wasn't interested in that type of lifestyle on a professional and permanent level. You have to do what makes you happy and writing romance was what made Colleen McCullough happy.

My Favorite Quotes from The Thorn Birds:
“The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.”

“Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.”  

“We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain… Or so says the legend.”  

Information on Colleen McCullough:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/books/colleen-mccullough-author-of-the-thorn-birds-dies-at-77.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-books-blog/2015/jan/30/myozobituary-colleen-mccullough-fans-mock-the-australians-churlish-obit

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102382743#.



Special Notes:
I'm going to try my best to write a post every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday/Sunday. Author spotlights will be on Thursdays except for this one of course. On Tuesdays, most likely I'll post writing tips/exercises and personal essays. And for the weekend, I'm going to attempt to do something fun, like a book tag or a personal tag, etc.

In April, I will be taking part in a blog challenge and I'll tell more about that in the upcoming weeks.

Happy Reading and Keep On Writing!

Meg