thePULSEBy Annette Cinelli
Summertime used to mean lounging on lazy days, running to the ice cream truck, and reading books from your school’s summer book list. Today you may have 2 weeks of lazy days instead of 2 months, and you’ve probably traded Bomb Pops for Skinny Cows, and without that list, it can be hard to find a fun summer read. Well that’s where Pulse comes in! For a great read this month, check out local author Cheryl Cory’s self-published debut novel Must’ve Done Something Good.
Must’ve Done Something Good opens with Sylvie O’Rourke on a plane ride back to her hometown of Worcester. During the flight, the plane encounters some terrible turbulence; barf bags are broken out, prayers are whispered, and as Sylvie sits sandwiched between her two sisters, she has an epiphany: “I need to do something good.”
Facing what she fears is certain death, Sylvie realizes that she hasn’t done anything worthy in her twenty-something years on this earth and bargains with God to save the plane. Once the plane lands safely and she returns home, her sisters hold her to her promise. She agrees to look through the help wanted section and apply for the first “good” job she sees. She lucks out and finds an English teacher position at St. Matthew’s, a small Catholic high school that will seem familiar to anyone who went to a certain similar high school in Worcester. She applies and lands the job immediately.
In her first year as a teacher, she faces difficulties with other teachers, struggles with procrastination, flips out at a grocery store, gets involved in a love triangle, watches “The Sound of Music” with her sisters, and tries to maintain some semblance of a social life. Readers will warm right away to Sylvie’s character and enjoy reading about her experience as a teacher. With tons of funny scenes and lots of Worcester references, it is sure to be a hit with Pulse readers.
The book is available online at stores.lulu.com/cherylcory or at amazon.com .
We caught up with Cheryl Cory, an Assumption College graduate who resides in Worcester and works as a writer/tutor/homemaker, to find out more about her first book and how she entered the writing industry. Cory decided to take a crack at writing a full-length novel during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). This is a creative writing project held annually that encourages participants to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30th. Cory thought, “That is such a crazy idea, and I’m going to try it!”
She only had a few days before NaNoWriMo started to come up with a plot. Cory had taught for a year at St. Peter-Marian Junior-Senior High School where she had “an amazing ~ not always good, but amazing ~ experience teaching English for a year.” She had always enjoyed reading about other people’s jobs, so she decided that would be the basis for her plot. The best writing advice she’s heard was, “Write the book you would like to read,” so Cory added to the mix two of her favorite things: “The Sound of Music” and Pride and Prejudice. After she finished the draft, she let it sit for a while before getting back into it, reviewing, editing, and revising it, and attempting to have it published.
Cory sent out dozens of query letters to a variety of agencies, but to no avail. She did, however, receive some helpful, personal responses to her request (which is unusual in the industry where form rejection letters are the norm), and that gave her hope. She decided to get her book out there herself and self-published Must’ve Done Something Good through lulu.com, a free site that prints books on demand as they are ordered and, for an extra fee, can even be made available on amazon.com!
When she’s not working on her next novel, a sequel to Must’ve Done Something Good, Cory can be found in some of her favorite Worcester haunts (The Bean Counter, Bocado, and Tortilla Sam’s, to name a few), walking around Indian Lake, or reading (which she confesses she may enjoy even more than writing). Be sure to check out Cory’s debut novel and to keep your eye on this local up-and-coming author.
