I’m Fixin’ To Write about This and That
I’m fixin’ to write about this and that.
That’s what I’ve done for the past seven or eight years—write about fixing to do this or that. That is until 64 weeks ago, a year and 12 weeks back, when I embarked upon serializing a novel I wrote several years ago. The novel had a title of “Playing Dead” which I converted to “I’m Fixin’ To Play Dead” in order to make it fit into my “Fixin’ To” theme.
The original novel consists of approximately 85,000 words and has a length of 314 pages. I completed the novel and got all the gremlins out of it several years ago, however, since I’m not a TV personality, a politician or a criminal I was never able to convince a publisher to read it.
So I had a small stack of rejection notices, stacked up along with the manuscript lying on the floor gathering dust, when I decided to serialize it. I got the idea from one of my greatest literary hero’s, Charles Dickens, who did the same thing about 175 years ago. Maybe in another 175 years I might get my work published.
As you might imagine, It was quite impossible for me to pack all 85,000 words and 314 pages into 64 newspaper columns. Which is just as well, because it was necessary to edit out a great deal of the story in order to make it “Fit to Print” in a family newspaper. But I did my best to convey the story while leaving out certain words and scenes, and I hope folks enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed rewriting it.
Many thanks also go to the editor and staff of The Monticello News for the publication of “I’m Fixing To Play Dead,” through the reading of which we found out that playing dead ain’t so easy.
Even though I never got “Playing Dead” published in book form, in 2008 I did get a book published by NewSouth Books, entitled “A Yellow Watermelon,” which has been followed up by the publications of three sequels: “Secret Of The Saltifa, Trouble On The Tombigbee & The Salvation Of Miss Lucretia.”
The first three books won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the young adult category and have all three been selected as Accelerated Reader Titles by Renaissance Reading. “A Yellow Watermelon” was also selected as one of the 25 books every young Georgian should read, by the Georgia Center for the Book. And “Trouble On The Tombigbee” won the 2013 Yerby Award For Fiction.
The difference in what I didn’t get published and what I did was that my published books fall into the genre of Young Adult Fiction (YAF). An interviewer once asked me what led me to writing YAF. I truthfully answered that I didn’t find it, but rather it found me.
I simply wrote about my childhood memories and escapades in the rural South in the late 1940s. Okay, yeah, I did imagine and make up a lot of stuff too. But the point is I didn’t know that was what I had written until my publisher told me so.
Sometime after my first publication I was discussing future endeavors with a lady author friend and asked her if she though I should continue writing in the young adult category, or revert back to my initial endeavors of writing adult fiction.
Her answer of using an old cliche, “If you get to the prom you dance with the one what brung you,” is the reason I now have four YAF novels published.
Even though my published works are classified as YAF (kids 9-15 years old), I have discovered that people of all ages also enjoy my work.
The question is, what am I fixin’ to write about next?
The answer is, I don’t know.
But never fear, I have a stack of stuff lying here and I have no doubt I can come up with something different each week.
On the other hand, I also have another unpublished novel lying here on the floor gathering dust, which seems to be calling out to me to pick it back up.
The title of it is “The Second Doublewide On The Right,” and the setting is in a place called Apt-To-Miss, in Ocmulgee County Georgia, and the characters in it are probably known to a lot of us, or could be fixin’ to be.