Carmen Smith

Email: ShandyLovelorn@hotmail.com

Carmen Michelle Smith

Aka Shandy Lovelorn and Michelle Karman


This writer was born January 29, 1970 in Winston-Salem, NC under the sign of Aquarius—though, for the record, she does not believe in Astrology.
She first decided that she’d like to be a writer when she grew up at age 11, when she began writing stories mimicking the style of her then-favorite writers, Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume.
Unfortunately, personal circumstances came between Ms. Smith and a career in writing until 1997, when she purchased her first PC (she had bought a Word Processor in 1993 and even used it to pound out a four-hundred page manuscript, but ditched it a few years later as being ‘juvenile, boring, manic, and pathetic’.
Within a year’s time, she’d written the manuscript that would become DARKNESS IN EDEN. She tried to gain the attention of a Literary Agent, but all the agents she contacted told her that vampire novels are ‘passe’. She read of iUniverse.com in the Business section of her city’s daily newspaper and decided to give them a try.
In January 2001, her novel was published to little fanfare, but this did not stop Ms. Smith from penning another manuscript (this one in less than 3 months) entitled: LOSA, the tale of a multiracial woman’s struggle for identity after discovering that her real father is a rich, white foreign Prince.
The Literary Agents told her novels dealing with racism are ‘passe’.
Instead of publishing with a POD or Electronic publisher, Ms. Smith used her time and energy to pound out another manuscript—SANGUINARY VISIONS—a vampire novel with slightly erotic overtones.
Ms. Smith is childless and single by choice, an avid traveler (Europe is her one and only destination, and she is working on a guide for travelers of non-European ancestry to prove it), loves writing, reading, and cooking,
has a habit of visiting cemeteries, peruses the WWW several times weekly, has the world’s biggest sweet tooth, and actually does not frighten easily.
She is currently planning another trip to Europe, working on a non-fiction project about modern Gypsies (Rom), and starting her own business while learning German. She is also planning to put together a Photo Book of her European Travels and working on novel set in Germany during WWII.

(My name is Carmen M. Smith, and while I am a published writer (under Writers Club Press), it is through iUniverse that I got my ‘start’. They are not a vanity press, as they do pay royalties, but writers must promote themselves, and I currently lack the financial resources to do that.

At any rate, I have written two complete manuscripts and am working on another at this time. I wrote Losa in 3 months, Sanguinary Visions in 3, and will probably finish the as-of-yet-untitled 3rd one in less than 4.

Losa concerns the life of a troubled biracial young woman who discovers, at age twenty-one, that her real father is white, rich, and a foreign Prince with a ‘legitimate’ family who do not really accept her. This novel deals with fairly mature subjects such as prostitution, glamour, bigotry, mental illness, and has some rather explicit sex scenes. Losa overcomes her insecurities and self-dislike, manages to climb out of the cesspool of lowlifes and vermin that surround her, and returns to Europe with an English friend, finally reuniting with her father and his family in a very startling, unsuspected manner.

Sanguinary Visions is the tale of two different women in two different countries with the same problem—they both have sisters who have been missing for years. Rivkah Gershowitz is a best-selling novelist and doesn’t believe in vampires.
Bonnie Guinn, a nurse who is seemingly obsessed with the bloodsucking entities, does. Harvena Weinberger, the sister of Rivkah’s best friend Totsy, vanishes while on a tour of Europe, and they fly off in search of her—but instead, get more than what they bargained for. As for Bonnie, she joins the International Society for Paranormal Investigations and heads for Germany to destroy the creatures, whom she’s convinced had something to do with her beloved sister Maven’s disappearance five years before.)

Interests: Writing, Reading, Travel--Europe, Cooking, Eating, Nature, Cats, Horses, And Exercising.

Published writer: Yes

Freelance: No