Carol Plum-Ucci and her latest book.
Carol Plum-Ucci is a hoot: a unique, gifted and lauded storyteller who takes the art of friendship and the craft of writing seriously but not so much herself.
That’s just the way it is with my friend, Carol.
She’s devoutly religious, for instance, but also curses like a sailor: extended, loud and profane. Frequently, her curses are punctuated by raucous laughter, most often at her own expense.
Knowing her, her new book’s title, Insane Possibilities, seemed perfect, especially apt since it is her first novel aimed at adults.
I knew Carol’s name before I ever met her during my years as a local journalist and eventually as my generous friend who sometimes also has mentored my writing.
For the years before her career as an author bloomed, the 67-year-old was a production assistant and then director of publications for the Miss America Organization, once a bedrock of the Atlantic City area: a schmaltzy mix of beauty, glitz, talent and shameless hucksterism, before finally getting tied up in a bow and served up to a rapt national television viewing audience in an event meant to extend the local summer tourist season.
Publicizing the young women before their big night on television was her job’s focus.
But while I knew Carol’s name and had seen her picture in publications, the first time we laid eyes on one another was when she had just moved to Absecon — she lives now in Linwood, with her husband, Rick. Her boxer dog bolted away during the move.
I’m a devoted dog guy, so I stuck the errant boxer dog walking by me in my fenced backyard, knowing someone would be along. Soon enough came Carol, carrying a tell-tale lead but without a pooch attached.
She fetched her roaming boxer home, and we made friends for life.
While she has numerous writing accolades and solid educational credentials from over the years, her imagination as a storyteller began as a child when she lived above the Brigantine funeral home operated by her father on the island just north of Atlantic City.
Carol’s bedroom hovered above the mortuary’s viewing area, perfect for fueling her vivid imagination, which leans strongly toward suspense and mystery, often tinged with the supernatural, all in Southern New Jersey settings.
She went to a now-defunct Quaker school in Atlantic City, and then Holy Spirit High School in Absecon before taking degrees at Purdue University, where she was a features editor for the student paper, and then Rutgers University.
Her career as a young adult novelist began with The Body of Christopher Creed, an acclaimed young adult book. The book won a major award — no, not a leg lamp — but the prestigious Michael L. Printz American Library Award, and she was also finalist for an Edgar Allen Poe award. She quit Miss A work to write full-time based on her first royalty payment.
Carol’s follow-up book did well and got good notices, but the next six YAs were mid-listers awash in a sea of such titles despite five of them getting listed for writing awards.
Needing to make a living, she turned to writing biblical studies publications for a specialty publisher, Fifth Estate, in Alabama, under a male pen name.
With an established business relationship in place, Carol turned to the religious book publisher’s offshoot hybrid publishing venture, Co-Pilot, and its leader, Breandan Lumpkin, son of the man she had long worked for when the fiction itch grabbed her again.
Working with a hybrid publisher, she did not need to find an agent, and the turnaround time was far faster. Writing for a market that included adults made her feel “less stuck in a box,” said Lumpkin. Carol’s daughters, who are about two decades apart, worked for Lumpkin’s publishing businesses, making it more compelling.
Caol Plum-Iucci reading from her new book at the Linwood Public Library last month. (Photo by Kevin Shelly)“I can do this, I can make this go," she told me just after hosting a kickoff invitation-only reading of Insane Possibilities at her local library in Linwood. “I’m thinking positive, and we’ll see what happens.”
These days, she’s relying on her very own angel, as well as her laptop.
This is the book’s synopsis as provided by Carol:
The night before his eighteenth birthday, Toby Kellerman fell ninety feet down a well.
Seven weeks passed in what he describes as “suspension hell,” a rotating bed for spinal cord injuries compounded by bone breaks. Able to move only his arms and watch life through an adjustable mirror, Toby had plenty of time to think about how he got there. Somebody had pushed him.
He could clearly remember running footsteps as he stared into the black well with his two younger sisters. They’d been on family vacation. Nobody knew them. There was no motive.
An Anglican priest on an evening stroll past the site saw the brother and two sisters, but nobody else. It had been dark. The police started to believe the attempted murderer could have been one of Toby’s sisters.
Grace was a bouncy, bubbly 15-year-old with a ton of friends. Trinity was “special.” With a stratospheric IQ, the 11-year-old had trouble talking and was considered a cutter, thanks to a compulsive habit of scratching her face. But Toby had developed a special bond after she’d been mauled by a dog six years earlier.
With the help of a girl on his rehab ward, Toby begins to see that the accident smells of a haunting. He never paid much attention to local Lake Indor rot about a witch with a meat hook, but investigation has him realizing that the 18th-century orphan likely died falling down a well … and likely the same well he went down.
It’s not a comfortable position, being totally confined while things start to move around the room, drawers begin to open and shut by themselves, and someone or something keeps pulling off the sock in his blind spot and scratching his leg.
Where is the truth? Has he unwittingly picked up a malevolent spirit, or is he imagining it all to protect his beloved youngest sister?
CLICK HERE FOR MORE ABOUT THE CAROL PLUM-UCCI.
