Calabasas Novelist Honored

In his 40 years, Calabasas-born author Gregory Mose has lived many lives.

He's been an aid worker in Africa, a cutthroat corporate lawyer in London, a stay-at-home dad, a hotelier running a holiday cottage in a French village, and now, an award-winning writer.

Mose's debut novel, "Stunt Road," recently won an Independent Publisher Book Award in the West-Pacific best regional fiction category.

The self-published novel, which was chosen from among 3,890 entries, is "about for-profit spirituality, inspired by the Tom Cruises, Madonnas and Kaballah, and the commercialized culture of spirituality," Mose said.

The book has several references to Moses' childhood home. "There are lot of scenes, mainly flashbacks of the main character's own childhood that are based here," Mose said. "There's fossil hunting on Mulholland and hiking in the canyons of Calabasas Highlands, which at one time were rolling hills filled with deer and coyotes."

Mose, who now lives in France with his wife, Sophia, and son, Sebastian, was not able to attend the May award ceremony in New York.

"I don't make enough off writing to be able to afford the plane ticket to New York," he explained candidly.

As Mose sees it, the book world is a quiet, lonely place where authors are "big news if they sell millions of copies, mediocre news if they get a great review in the New York Times Review of Books, and no news if they are anything else."

Although Mose doesn't regret choosing writing as his latest career, there have been periods of doubt. "There have been times, particularly with this book, when I thought I wrote the wrong book," Mose said. "It's a challenging book, in the sense that it doesn't necessarily tell people what they want to hear. It gently pokes fun at everyone. But I have never regretted writing it."

After earning an English literature degree from Harvard University, Mose spent a year teaching in Athens, Greece, before enrolling for three years at Duke University, where he studied law.

His next stop was Conakry, the  small dilapidated capital of Guinea, where he worked for two years with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and helped to look after the nearly 600,000 Sierra Leoneans and Liberians who had fled to the West African country.

Mose found that job emotionally challenging, and incompatible with the family life he and his fiancee hoped to create. They moved to London, and he became a corporate lawyer. But his heart was never in that profession.

"After three years of working at a job I didn't enjoy, I decided I was on a wrong career track and that I needed to stop," Mose said.

The couple moved with their son to France, where they had spent vacations.

"We found it to be idyllic and unspoiled," Mose recalled. "Village after village with medieval houses and little bakeries, rolling farmland and forests, truffles, mushrooms and wine. We realized we were happier here than in London, watching drug deals on the street corners, and struggling in the Tube to get to work."

It was time to change direction and take a little risk. So the couple moved into a medieval farmhouse, where they rent out holiday cottages and run a property finding business.

It was the perfect setting for him to pursue writing, which he had loved from a young age. When he first settled down in France, writing was an on-and-off process however.

"The problem with writing is that unless you are Stephen King, and have publishers giving you deadlines, and the money from it paying your bills, writing always tends to take a backseat to something else," he said.

After Mose came up with the idea for "Stunt Road" during lunch at a new age restaurant in Topanga Canyon, he spent much to the next 10 years trying to find time to write.

"For a long time I wrote on the bus on the way to work," said Mose. "Then there was a period of getting up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning and writing before work, then there was fitting it in at my son's nap times or speaking into a dictaphone while pushing his buggy through the park."

Once he did sit down to finish the novel, the writing process proved hard but not as difficult as finding a publisher. Even after he had tightened and edited his manuscript considerably, publishers did not respond to his queries.

And then the economy collapsed.

"Publishers started saying openly that they had no interest in fiction by unknown writers," said Mose. He realized quickly that self-publishing would be the best solution to the problem.

He designed the book cover, put together the Kindle electronic book reader edition, and promoted it using social networking. He also entered his book in literary competitions, which ultimately won him the Independent Publisher award.

Mose is now at work on his next novel, which is set in Guinea in the late 1990s, and is based on his experience as an aid worker there.

Mose is hopeful that Barnes & Noble in Calabasas will be stocking "Stunt Road" soon.