MARRIED TO IT

JACKSON -- Jacqueline Close was going to give up on being a writer if she didn't win the first-place award for science fiction at the recent Heartland Writers Conference.

"I decided if I didn't win I wasn't going to pursue fiction at all and just focus on helping him," she said, referring to her husband Ed's writing ambitions.

But Jacqui won. Ed finished third, but also won the conference's first-place award for nonfiction. They're still a two-writer family.

If Jacqui and Ed's writerly dreams come true, their manuscripts "Altar of the Earth" and "Transcendental Physics" will be at your local bookstore one day soon.

The couple are both unpublished writers who've spent the past few years diligently chopping their way through the publishing jungle. They reached one milestone -- "We're still getting rejections but we are getting rejections with hand-written letters," Jacqui said -- and their writing awards are another.

To enter the Heartland Writers Conference writing competition, all the authors at the writers conference submitted a first chapter and synopsis.

The awards entitled each to a tete-a-tete with book editors, both of whom termed their works "saleable." It's a magic word any author wants to hear from a publisher.

Jacqui's "Altar of the Earth" is set in the planet's near, precarious future. The protagonist is an American astronaut, and the antagonist is an alien bent on preventing the Earth from being saved from self-destruction.

Jacqui's manuscript makes use of a Tibetan myth about a spiritually advanced land called Shambala, whose kings have chosen a woman to save the Earth. The savior is half-American, half-Tibetan, the first female Dalai Lama.

"You have managed to find an original take on a standard plot," Ginjer Buchanan, science fiction editor of ACE Books, wrote in her critique.

Buchanan wants to read the book when Jacqui finishes it 70 pages from now.

Ed's "Transcendental Physics" aims to provide nothing less than a mathematical proof of the existence of non-physical reality. "It bridges the gap between physical science and the spiritual quest," he says.

Ed, who has a Ph.D. in physics and is a Mensa member, employs "non-numerical mathematics" and accepted theorems and experiments to buttress the proof. It represents a breakthrough, he says.

"The accepted paradigm in science has no room for the non-physical."

Ed is a former employee of the U.S. Geological Survey. Since moving to Jackson from California in 1992, the Closes have operated an environmental consulting business. Their son Joshua is a recent graduate of Jackson High School.

Jacqui is an alumnus of writing programs at UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley. She hadn't thought about writing until 1988, when she enrolled at UCLA with the mission of helping Ed with his writing. "I saw it as an overwhelming task, but if it was important to him I wanted to learn about it," she said. "I think it's a learned ability."

Jacqui works in a neat book-lined study decorated with Eastern religious symbols. Ed's desk is a mound of papers illuminated with a fluorescent light. When it comes to writing, they mostly go their separate ways and are careful about where they tread.

"For the science fiction contest we did not critique each other's writing," Jacqui says.

The idea of quitting has vanished from Jacqui's mind now, one more jungle pathway cleared.

"Since (the editor) wants the book, I don't feel like I can give up," she says.