Benton woman's novel was 'labor of love'

When famous American authors are discussed, it's likely that Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are a part of the conversation. Fans of more contemporary authors might say that Stephen King, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth should also be included on a list of America's top writers.

Judith Hill, who lives on a family farm in rural Benton, Mo., isn't on anyone's list of top authors, at least not yet. Her first novel, "The Equation," a 457-page story about the love shared between two people when they were young, was recently published in paperback and e-book form on amazon.com.

"It was a labor of love," said Hill, 66. "But I have a love of writing and I wanted to tell this story. We can all look back and remember that we fancied someone when we were younger."

"The Equation" follows the lives of a Long Island high-school student, Sarah Thompson, and her Algebra teacher, Travis Hall, who shared an unrequited love for each other in the early 1960s. The novel explores their mutual -- and platonic -- attraction to each other and what their love means to them, and what happens when they finally reunite in the 1980s.

"[Sarah and Travis] fall in love and they remain in love even after their initial relationship ends," Hill said. "That's theme of the book, that the love is still there."

LAURA SIMON ~ lsimon@semissourian.com

A native of the Long Island town of Syosset, N.Y., Hill formerly worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce and was also a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. She moved to the Benton area in 1977 after her marriage to Andy Hill, an airline pilot who retired from Northwest Airlines in 1999. But Hill said she always felt that she could become a writer and once even started a novel when she was in her twenties.

"The time period I had chosen for my novel was ancient Greece," she said. "I didn't have the time to do the necessary research because I was raising children, so I put it on the back burner. Once the children left home and I had more time on my hands, the idea of writing started coming back."

Hill's idea gained traction when she won second place in a writing competition at Southeast Missouri State University in 1983.

"I thought that if I entered the competition and placed, it would give me the thumbs-up to know that I could do it. But, again, life interrupted and I had to put it on hold. I finally got to the point where I realized that once you've reached 55 or 60, you don't want to look back thinking of all the things you were going to do but never did. I could fail as easily as I could be successful, but what I didn't want was to say I never tried."

Hill said when she began work on "The Equation" in 2006, she remembered two quotes that have always stayed with her.

"One, the art of writing is placing the seat of the pants to the chair and doing it," she said. "Two, write you know. I wrote about a time frame and settings that I'm familiar with, and it helped my writing."

Andy Hill said he could vouch for the effort that his wife put into her novel.

"She would start early in the morning," he said, "and I would go off to Cape or work here on the farm. I'd come back and she was still writing. Then she would fix dinner and after we've cleaned up everything, she was back at it."

In writing the story, Hill said she was partly inspired by a meeting she had with an older woman who had once experienced an unrequited love with an older boy.

"I visited with her at a party," she said. "She was 83 at the time, and when she was 14 she fell in love with a boy next door, and he loved her. But her parents forbid her to have anything to do with him, and they weren't even allowed to talk to each other. Sixty-seven years had passed and she had tears running down her cheek when she talked about him. It left a profound impact on me."

Hill said that she finished writing "The Equation" in early 2012, but then came the frustrating process of trying to get her manuscript published. Many publishing companies sent her rejection letters that explained they weren't accepting any new authors at the time.

"They were typical form letters," she said. "It was disheartening, but I later found out from some New York editors that the literary world was in a state of flux. I had come on the scene with the advent of changes in computer technologies and print-on-demand capabilities, and I was trying to make inroads the old-fashioned way. It wasn't working."

Hill said once her novel was properly edited, she decided to self-publish "The Equation."

"You have to do all of the hard work," she said. "You self-publish and then maybe publishing companies will take notice of your work."

Hill self-published with CreateSpace, a subsidiary of amazon.com, that she said would give her more bang for the buck.

"CreateSpace cost less than others," she said, "and what I did with them would go up on Amazon as a print-on-demand paperback and also as an e-book."

Hill said she harbors no illusions about becoming wealthy from writing "The Equation."

"You're not going to get rich doing this unless you sell thousands of copies," she said. "The average book from a self-published author only sells 100 copies or less."

As advice to other fledgling writers, Hill said they have to make sure that they love doing it.

"If you're heart isn't in it, you'll never get through the push required to get through it. It's the same advice we gave our children: We don't care what you do in life so long as you absolutely love it. If you don't, you won't stick with it. You have to find something that turns you on inside, and if you do, the door will open. You just don't need to want to do it, you must feel you have to do it. It's as simple as that."

klewis@semissourian.com

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