Welcome to the official website of Priscilla Stone Sharp - Author
Facebook page:
Priscilla Stone Sharp - Author
STARTS NEW WRITING AND PUBLISHING CAREER AT 79
In 2006, after retiring from working mostly in law offices for more than 40 years, I entered my second “career” as a Genetic Genealogist and Search Angel, working free of charge to help adoptees and others separated from biological family or who were surprised with DNA results (including my own husband, but that’s a “whole ‘nother story”). Over the next 15 years I solved more than 2,000 searches and assisted my local police department in identifying and bringing to justice two “cold case” violent offenders.
In 2020, my search and genealogy work began slowing down, due mainly to the pandemic and also the recent proliferation of several competent and well-organized Search Angel groups, so I found myself, like many others, cooped up at home with lots of time. One of the suggestions to fight off ennui and “cabin fever” was to clean out closets and drawers. Rooting through my office closet, I found a banker’s box full of over 2,000 pages of typewritten research and transcriptions that I had spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars gathering back in 2003 preparatory to writing a biography of Rowena Granice Steele, California pioneer, actress, author and newspaper publisher. When we moved from Arizona to Pennsylvania in 2004, the box had been put away and out of sight/out of mind as life got in the way.
I was delighted and re-energized with my find and determined to see the project through. Over the next three years, I completed the biography and then decided to gather the short stories, select columns, and novels into three collected works volumes. I studied the publishing options and decided that, at age 79, I did not have the time or patience to find an agent or publisher that would be willing to look at my work, so I chose Indie publishing. I hired a graphics artist to work on the covers, a publicist, and some Indie publishing experts to guide me through the process.
Over the course of 2024, I formatted and published the first three volumes of Rowena—The Life and Collected Works of Rowena Granice Steele, in hard cover, paperback and Ebook, which are now available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other major book outlets, and directly from me, PSSPublications@gmail.com.
In the process, I was so delighted with the product quality from my printer that I decided to dust off my first book, published in 2002 and 2003, Langhorn and Mary, A 19th Century American Love Story, the dramatized saga of my 2nd great grand aunt Mary (Stone) Wellings and her husband, Langhorn H. Wellings of Bucks County, PA, which had been out of print since 2004. I chose a beautiful work of art by Pennsylvania artist Jennifer Shuey (www.jennifershueyart.com) and published the third edition in November 2024.
In 2025 I will celebrate my 80th birthday by completing Volume IV of Rowena—“Journeyings”—and helping my husband put his years of work and research on sustainability and economic resiliency into print.
Contact:
psspublications [at] gmail [dot] com
or
priscillasharp [at] Comcast [dot] net
