My wife, Lydia, and I were doing our favorite thing which is sitting on our patio and having coffee with our friends at 7 o’clock in the morning, when I started taking notes on why we started writing fiction. Over the last several years we have written eight unpublished novels. Now, I think we are about ready to give ourselves permission to share some of our stories with a circle of people far larger than the circle of friends we now enjoy. When I’m in this mood, my thoughts almost almost always spiral back to our time in New Orleans, Louisiana, where our lives took many twists and turns.
Callie Houston is a fictitious name. Her character bears only a coincidental relationship to anyone living or dead. Having said that, Callie was born from the knowledge of many young women with whom we crossed paths in the New Orleans area.
During that time in our lives, we ran a manufacturing business and lived on our sailboat. Our company built special purpose computers, did research on sickle cell anemia, manufactured specialty coatings for the oil patch, and engaged in a host of activities that now seem incredibly ambitions. The young women that drifted through our lives were often very bright, some lived without much hope or opportunity, others had ambitions that could not be realized without someone to give them a helping hand.
An article in the New Orleans Picayune said it quite well. “Our search for excellence is most often the search for excellence in others.” That has certainly turned out to be an important part of the way we live our life. We have written thousands of pages of technical and instructional materials. After countless speeches and much travel, we finally realized that the only way our story can reach the right audience is to create characters like Callie Houston, Morgan, Noel, Sam, Lazarra Rayburn, and many others whose sole purpose for existence is to tell these stories that we lived.
L.C. Frenzel is really the name for the writing team of Dr. Lydia Frenzel and Charles Frenzel. Lydia has her Ph.D. in chemistry; Charles is the physicist in the family. Having experienced first hand the second class citizenship of women, especially in the sciences, we were determined to pursue the creation of characters of young women who survived their early life experience and went on to succeed in ways that were satisfying to them. We’ve never believed in the glass ceiling, which for us has always been a matter or giving someone permission to succeed. These women that we write about succeed by giving themselves permission to exist and to thrive.
Lydia M. Frenzel
Charles A. Frenzel
May, 2010
May 17, 2010
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