About Carolyn Burns Bass

I began my career writing as Carolyn A. Burns while at Orange Coast College during the 1980s. After an internship with Contemporary Christian Music magazine, I joined the staff and was promoted to assistant editor. I wrote cover stories, personality profiles, record and concert reviews, attended the Grammy Awards and met many pop icons of my generation. But fiction was my first writing love.

Leaving publishing behind, I spent three years in Japan courtesy of my husband's duty as a Marine Corps pilot. While in Japan I fell in love with Japanese culture, food, and people. Although I crave the smell of a blueline and miss the thrill of a slick magazine fresh off the press, I did not return to fulltime publishing upon returning to the US. I became a WAHM (Work At Home Mom) instead.

I have written food reviews for local publications, articles for specialty journals, and self-published two books: Kalligraphia--the Art of Beautiful Handwriting (a workbook for learning italic calligraphy, now out of print) and Write from the Heart, a guidebook on writing personal memoirs. Both books were written for classes I taught for city adult education departments. But fiction is still my first writing love.

I now write travel features for the Riverside Press-Enterprise newspaper and publish a blog called Ovations. When not writing, I operate Word*Art Solutions, a creative business communications studio in Southern California, specializing in travel and incentive marketing and am the administrator for the southern California chapter of the Society of Incentive & Travel Executives.

I wrote my novel The Nexus in response to a question that brewed inside for several years. I imagined a place where the soul is drawn and nurtured during times of trauma. The Nexus is the story of a man and a woman, separated by centuries, but joined together in a common love.

Most recently I completed The Sword Swallower's Daughter, a coming of age tale set in the turbulent 1960s when the British invaded the pop airwaves, the Vietnam War raged on the TV sets in American homes, and racial unrest peaked with the assassination of Martin Luther King.