Life will throw things at you now and then. Laura McBride knows this. She’s dealt with it.
And you know what? She threw right back.
That’s how McBride, an English professor at CSN for the past 15 years, wrote a novel that Library Journal is calling “an urgent morality tale for our times in the form of this poignant and gripping debut.”
The novel, “We Are Called to Rise,” comes out Tuesday, June 3. Barnes & Noble has named it a “Discover Great New Writers” pick for Summer, 2014. As such, McBride will be at Barnes & Noble, 2101 North Rainbow Boulevard, at 7 p.m. Tuesday to celebrate the publication. Anyone can stop by and chat.
“I told myself I’d just sit in this little room, totally isolated from the rest of my life, and write,” McBride said.
It wasn’t that easy, of course. And her success was hardly predetermined. In fact, she didn’t even set out to write a novel in the first place.
Nope. She wanted to get her Ph.D.
She’d been teaching English for years, was involved with the Faculty Senate, fully enveloped by life at CSN. She loved it.
So, she looked into the doctorate program in Educational Leadership at UNLV. That seemed like a good fit. She made plans, including scheduling a sabbatical that would allow her to work on her dissertation. But the plans all fell through. She wouldn’t be able to go through the Ph.D. program.
She did not want to give up her sabbatical, which would have given her a year off teaching. Now that there would be no work on a non-existent dissertation, she wondered what she might use the sabbatical for. You can’t just sit around watching Netflix. That’s not how these things work. 
She thought she might write that book she’d always thought about. On the fly, she reworked her sabbatical paperwork, applied for a fancy writing retreat called Yaddo that she knew she’d never get accepted into, and plunged forward.
She sat down and in a single morning, mapped out where she wanted the story to go. It would be set in Las Vegas, but the suburbs, mostly, not the Strip.
It would involve regular folks, not casino big-shots, not the mob, not the glitz and glamour from the television commercials.
It would have an incredible, based-on-real-life event exactly halfway through.
She wrote and she wrote and she wrote. She liked what she was doing, though it was difficult.
And then word came that she’d been accepted into that writing retreat, Yaddo. It houses all kinds of artists on a 400-acre spread in upstate New York. Basically, it provided her with lots of quiet time to write, and it introduced her to some amazing artists.
She happened to meet a writer who introduced her to her agent. That agent looked over McBride’s work, and she loved it.
McBride spent most of 2012 writing, and by early 2013, she was pretty much done. She gave it to her agent.
It sold in a week.
She was blown away. She still is, even as she’s working on her second book and working on publicity for the first.
She says there’s a lesson in this, not just for her, but for anybody who dreams of doing something cool: Sit your butt down and do it.
“I didn’t need any of this,” she said, smiling. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”