Their presentation is part of the Davison Lecture Series at the Dalton-Whitfield Public Library. The program, sponsored by the Dalton-Whitfield Public Library, will take place at the Library, located at the corner of Waugh and Cappes Streets in Dalton. The evening will begin at 6:30 PM with light refreshments at a pre-lecture reception in the presenters’ honor, sponsored by the Friends of the Dalton-Whitfield Public Library. The lecture will follow the reception at approximately 6:45 PM.
Among the topics they will address are how to get the best for your money when self publishing, the publishing process including what is really involved when traditionally publishing a work, and, how to promote your published work and get it to the readers.
The Davison Lecture Series was named in memory of former Dalton resident Bob Davison.
Cady is the author of the spine tingling “The Handler”; Miller is the author of “Enjoy Your Money - How to Make it, Save it, Invest it, and Give it.”
David Cady grew up in Northwest Georgia not far from the Tennessee River and Chattanooga where his first published novel The Handler is set. He graduated from Dalton High School in 1964. After having taught and coached football in Florida, Cady returned to Dalton as a science teacher and football coach. In 1975 he received his Master’s degree in biology from the University of Georgia. In 2000, he completed the first draft of a novel that takes place in Florida. The story was never published and still waits on his revisions. Cady immediately started work on his next novel, The Handler, which is about a young mother trapped in a snake-handling cult and a Viet Nam veteran hired to find and rescue her from the clutches of a malicious preacher.
Cady acknowledges that much of what he wrote would be unbelievable for the reader. “Few understand how cruel and demented some spiritual cults can and did become. While researching the more famous religious groups, and long before I wrote one line of this story, I was staggered by the brutality encountered in the name of God. What leads people to follow these religious fanatics, and why do some of these leaders become so evil that they rape, mutilate, and destroy their followers? No one may ever understand this behavior, but I have tried to give some reason to their happenings. Even though this fictional story based on actual events may seem beyond belief at times, I assure you that in reality, it was worse, much, much worse.”
As a son of an artist-minister, Cady had vivid memories of attending such services as a small child. Before writing one word of the novel, he spent six months doing research on religious cults such as the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and Jim Jones’ mass suicide in Jonestown (Guyana). To learn how missing people are found, Cady worked with a detective who lived on a boat on the Tennessee River. He is working on a prequel to The Handler and has submitted several short stories for publication.
He and his wife, Cindy, have two adult children and three grandchildren. They live on a mountain in Whitfield County, Georgia. When he is not writing, he plays golf, and teaches one class a day at an alternative high school in Dalton.
J. Steve Miller is the founder and president of Legacy Educational Resources, providing resources for teachers of life skills and character education in public schools, as well as pastors and youth workers. . He is also writing free, Web-based (www.enjoyyourmoney.org) resources for teaching students how to manage their money more wisely.
A self-styled "wisdom broker," he collects wisdom from many fields and packages it for teachers and writers via his published books and the Web.
Miller has recently finished his latest book, Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It!, and was interviewed on Fox 5, Good Day Atlanta.
For over 30 years, Miller has spoken to large and small groups from Georgia to Moscow, Russia. Recently, he was moderator of a panel on inspirational writing at the Georgia Writers Association and received a five star review by The Midwest Book Review.
Attendees at his programs have commented, "Informal and very inspiring. Thank you so much for all the great information!", “You have a great sense of humor and lots of information to share. I really enjoyed all of this! Thank you!”, "Positive speaker offering hope, knowledge and inspiration. Excellent information presented in a fun, upbeat format. Good understanding of the audience - from novices to different genres.", and "Your enthusiasm is contagious."
Miller states that authors differ widely in how they write. His method, “…would drive some crazy. Take what you can use; flush the rest.”
He gets his ideas from his ‘chatty muse.’ “Sometimes she bugs me relentlessly, feeding me ideas rapid fire while I'm driving, cooking, lifting weights or mowing. While I'm writing one manuscript, she taunts me by offering juicy morsels for other articles or books or Websites. I never stifle her. Instead, I'm never without paper and pen, a recorder, or a computer file to capture her musings. Ideas accumulate much faster than I could ever shape them into articles or books. I'm sure I'll die with hundreds of ideas that never see the printed page.”
Miller briefly outlined some of his techniques for gathering information. “I don't just research for my present project; I read for a lifetime of writing. So whether I'm reading a biography of DaVinci, a weighty tome on investing, or a technical journal on ethnomusicology, I index it for ideas, quotes and stories. Additionally, I copy and paste ideas from e-mails and online reading to files in my computer. As I write, I draw from my databases, computer files, and the back of unharvested books for my illustrative material.
Miller harkens back to Dale Carnegie's classic self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, as a nonfiction model. Carnegie says, in the preface:
"In preparation for this book, I read everything that I could find on the subject - everything from newspaper columns, magazine articles, records of the family courts, the writings of the old philosophers and the new psychologists. In addition, I hired a trained researcher to spend one and a half years in various libraries reading everything I had missed, plowing through erudite tomes on psychology, pouring over hundreds of magazine articles, searching through hundreds of magazine articles, searching through countless biographies, trying to ascertain how the great leaders of all ages had dealt with people. We read their biographies. We read the life stories of all great leaders from Julius Caesar to Thomas Edison. I recall that we read over one hundred biographies of Theodore Roosevelt alone. We were determined to spare no time, no expense, to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages for winning friends and influencing people."
David Cady and J. Steve Miller will be selling and signing books following their presentation. The Feb. 25 program is free and open to the public and is most suitable for an audience of young adults and adults. For further information, please contact the library by e-mail to fogartyn@ngrl.org.
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