Barbara Schnell
In a career devoted to full-time employment avoidance, Barbara Schnell has worked at an insurance company and a San Francisco law firm—both now defunct but she claims no part in the failures. Really. She restored a 1921 California bungalow in Los Angeles, set a cash-winning record on $25,000 Pyramid, and came in last on Jeopardy. She played flute and sang mezzo with the St. Athanasius Episcopal choir. Oh, and she’s also a member of SAG/AFTRA. With reference to writing credentials, Barbara has had a short story, “Grandma’s Straw Hat”, published in an anthology. Another short story, “Tracks”, was published in Literary Landscapes. Six of her flash-fiction stories have won the Southern California Writers’ Association “Will Write for Food” contest and have been published in SCWA’s collection. She got so many raves about her Christmas letter that she and her husband, Gordon, published them as an epistolary memoir called Greetings from Casa Cesspoole. Her debut novel was First Year. Her second novel, Marianne Moves On, just won the 2020 National Indie Excellence Award for Chick Lit. She lives with her patient husband and two cats.
Marianne Moves On (Chick Lit, Romantic Comedy, Contemporary Romance, Women’s Fiction)
Winner of the 2020 National Indie Excellence Award for Chick Lit.
Small-town girl Marianne Fuchs spends her childhood dominated by her fiercely Irish-Catholic mother. Her mother decides what she wears, where she goes to school, what she majors in. Marianne decides it’s time for independence. This feminine Candide packs up her meager belongings and moves to Los Angeles. Not only is L.A. the center of excitement, both good and bad, it’s a long way from her mother. But life in L.A. is not all the media makes it out to be. For one thing, it’s expensive! She also discovers that it’s hard to meet people. And she doesn’t seem to fit in
anywhere. This sheltered young woman suffers from culture shock. She experiences a lot of ‘firsts’. She sees a porn film, she sees a naked man on stage, she gets HBO! After being immersed in sex she begins to think her mother is right; maybe Los Angeles is Sodom. She has a lot of adjusting to do.
Fortunately, life in Los Angeles is not all sex. She joins a softball team. She handles an unreasonable boss. And she finds love—or at least a severe case of ‘like’. Time and distance give her courage to tell her mother when she and her boyfriend move in together. The result isn’t what she’d like but at least she stood up to her mother, another ‘first’. She faces her future bravely—until she’s evicted from her apartment. She wanted adventure but she’s finding that most adventures are uncomfortable things–and that very little in life goes according to plan. When her
boyfriend suggests marriage, she hesitates. Is it the smart thing to do? Or is she replacing her mother with a husband?