More GWTW as 'Rhett Butler's People' appears

"Rhett Butler's People," Donald Craig's authorized sequel to "Gone With the Wind," will be officially released by St. Martin's Press on November 6.

I understand the role of money, and perhaps even the role of art, in the Mitchell Estate's authorized sequels. They not only continue to control and profit from the material, but they also make it more difficult for unauthorized sequels to succeed once Scarlett's and Rhett's stories before and/or after GWTW have been told and become part of the canon.

Margaret Mitchell refused to write a sequel. I wish her view could have been respected. But I also know that had it been, somebody would have written an unauthorized sequel outside the control of the family once the copyright expired. Alexandra Ripley's squel, "Scarlett," came out in 1991 when the copyright on GWTW was one year away from expiration. (Congress ans subsequently extended coprights, giving GWTW protection out to 2031.)

Will I be tempted to read Craig's sequel even though I'm opposed to anyone but the original author tinkering with characters they didn't create? Perhaps, but I'll feel bad about myself for making an exception.

How Far Is It?

David Ward, the main character in my novel in progress, has the uncanny ability of being able to tell you how far apart any cities on the planet are from each other without looking it up.

If you say, "New York City and Paris," he'll say "3,635 miles" before you can take your next breath. And then if you say, "what about Waukegan, Illinois and Orlando," he'll say, "Orlando is 1,023 miles south-southwest of Waukegan."

All of the distances are, "as the crow flies."

Since I neither have such an ability nor want to laboriously measure distances on maps, I use a handy website called How Far Is It to quickly compute these distances. Whether you're writing a novel, doing research for a nonfiction book, thinking about an upcoming trip, or are simply curious, this easy-to-use site is a big help.

Since you can use any of the following formats, "Orlando, FL," "Paris," "London, England," and "35:52:57N 46:40:48E," in any combination, you can find distances to geographical features such as mountains and lakes.

The co-ordinates also make it possible to find distances to cities not in their database: e.g., they have the small town of Babb, Montana but do not have Goteborg, Sweden. So, all you need to do is go to the Wikipedia entry for Goteborg, copy the co-ordinates, and the enter them in the How Far Is It search engine.

The site is a free service of Bali and Indonesia on the Net.

Reference Sources

Online Writing Lab maintains a multi-page website with great listings for writers. Click here, for example, to see their listing of reference sources from spelling to grammar to libraries and periodicals.

OWL is maintained by Purdue University.

Malcolm

Say it ain't so, Jo

No, Jo Rowling, I'm not asking you to tell me that Dumbledore isn't really gay because I don't care one way or the other; I was rather hoping you'd acknowledge that the canon of a book is contained within the book--as written.

We acknowledge as writers that we know a lot more about the characters in our fiction than we commit to the page and that with our readers' frames of reference, the public may see more stories in our work than we intended to put there.

Sure, as you said, caution the script writer for an upcoming film not to include imaginary memories of women that the headmaster wouldn't have had. But announcing that the character is gay is, rather a cheap stunt, not something you needed to do.

And it's irrelevant because--if you didn't say it in the series--it doesn't count as truth.

The Stuff New Freelance Writers Need to Know

Long-time freelancer Sharon Hurley Hall provides down-to-earth advice for writers on her website Get Paid to Write.

In a series of short, highly readable tips in her Making it as a Freelancer series, she explores everthing from structuring your articles to landing interviews to getting paid.

Excellent advice from a pro!

Writer's Resource Site

Looking for writing, editing and promotional advice? Find your way to inspiredauthor.com, the professionally run site that is Turning Hobby Writers into Paid & Published Authors .

The multiple writer's blogs on this site provide a variety of points of view as well as a diverse focus on writing specialties.

Excerpt from the novel in progress

I'm posting an 815-word excerpt from my 250,000-word novel in progress in hopes that displaying it here and in today's MySpace blog will serve as a cattle prod for my actually finishing what my wife and I both call "the damn novel."

The novel is an odyssey of magic and betrayal set between 1954 and 1982. The main character is David Ward who played a minor role in The Sun Singer. Tom Elliot, referred to as Grandfather Elliot in The Sun Singer, makes a number of appearances in this new story.

David Ward is a mountain climber who grew up on a Montana ranch. He went off to college, served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, and got married. Here, then, is a scene called "Pending Divorce."
---

When David told Jill he wanted a divorce, she lit another menthol cigarette, scribbled a note in the margin of a report, and poured a fresh cup of coffee. While she stirred in the coffee creamer, they stared at each other across the table. It was their first eye contact in months.

They sat in Her Private Hell where the television screamed, where briefcases sat overflowing with work dragged home from General Amalgamated, Inc., where co-workers and cohorts assembled for her lectures about all subjects under heaven.

--Do you want me to move out? she asked. She glanced at her watch. How matter of fact she was, never losing control, not a hair or an emotion out of place.


--No, I will, he said. He turned down the volume on the TV.

--When? she asked.

--When I find an apartment—perhaps one of the faculty units on campus. He tilted his chair against the wall, noting her frown. There's so much to pack--it may take a few weeks.

--Remind me to tell Nancy how you burned our comfortable nest.

--That's hardly even a fact, he said.

When the phone rang, she laughed and shouted 'ask not,' and answered on the third ring with her no-nonsense department manager's voice. The quick change in her tone told him it was her mother. Champions of the unremitting conversation, Jill and Mrs. Martin talked long past the late news without a cry or a whisper about the late breaking story.
He stood up and stretched, and when she made no move to stop him, he went upstairs and stepped out on the deck with a glass of red wine to watch the stars.

Did he love her when they met ten years ago? Yes yes, otherwise he was a fool then wasn't he, but now the memory sickened him. Of late, he cursed that day, the expressions on their faces, the movements of head and heart, the words spoken, the significant silences, and the positions of the planets that attracted her to him and him to her. With time, the expressions, movements, words, silences, planets, and the subsequent plans that followed, became undone. He thought of the child. Her world was undone and she did not know it, perhaps would not understand it for years or a lifetime.

The child was exquisite. Hair, blond, short, a pixie cut. Eyes, wide, blue, filled with wonder, like a spring sky. Hands, so small, curious, exploring every room and experience like a kitty's nose. Personality, innocent, not such a terrible two, except at night when it was time to sleep, but without condition she trusted him. The trust grew heavy when he was tired; the pure innocence was lighter than air. As the moon perched on the top branch of the oak behind the house, tears filled his eyes, drawn forth like a rip tide. The years would bring a challenge. How to keep the child from casting him out, too. Her mother had stolen his substance slowly until he became a shadow in his own house.

The child, Nancy Margaret Ward--how carefully they had chosen the name, Nancy for Jill's mother and Margaret for David's mother--was two years, three months, and fourteen days old. He had been excluded from most of it. Using one of Jill's flip charts for the presentation, David could, if called upon, show that it took only 120 days of Nancy Margaret Ward's innocent 840-day life for her to become a fatherless child. Doing the numbers, one found that 14.3% of her life included an optimum father-daughter relationship while 85.7% did not. Projecting the current rate of stagnation over the next five years produced charts and graphs that strongly indicated a declining interaction, a reduction of trust, and a loss of innocence.

The night wind was cold, like a kitty's nose or the hand of a child; it tickled the back of his neck and explored the eaves, the shutters and the neatly-raked piles of leaves along the side of the house. He leaned back into the chaise longue and listened to the season changing from autumn to winter.

Was there any point in assigning fault here? Where is it--Geneva or The Hague?--where old men wearing black robes convene Marriage Crimes Tribunals, to hear the complaints and the arguments and the evidence, to hear the witnesses, expert, material, hostile, and otherwise, and after due deliberation issue an order, to wit, 'Jill Martin shall forthwith wash that man right out of her hair.'

He inferred, on that August night when Jill wore red and he wore green, when there was no moon and her mood was stiffer than starched cuffs, that he was by no means faultless. If there was a flaw in their togetherness, it was that they unknowingly began their marriage imprisoned by separate dreams.
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Copyright (c) 2007 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Judge a Book by Its Cover

Nikki Leigh, author of Widow's Walk and Lady Lightkeeper, runs a unique weblog called Judge a Book by Its Cover. With each post, she asks an author for the story behind the cover of his or her book.

The Sun Singer's cover was posted on October 7. I was very happy to report that I think iUniverse did a very good job with the cover.

Thanks, Nikki

Historic Preservation - The Stories We Find in Old Buildings

Yesterday, I enjoyed presenting a short talk about the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) to the folks the Methodist Church's Wednesday Night Supper.


As the chair of the HPC, I'm usually focused on a building's architecture because, by law, we concentrate on the exterior of a building when a business owners or a resident within the city's historic districts asks for permission to make changes--a new roof, an addition on the back, or a new rence and gate along the sidewalk.

Last night, however, we talked about the stories we find in the buildings. All of us have memories of things that happened at the houses we have lived in, some good, some bad, and those are--for us--a part of what made each house a home.

In addition to the architecture that sets an old home firmly within the time period of its construction, is the history of what happened there. In one house, the town's famous doctor lived. Just off the square, a general store built in 1858. Across town, a one-time cotton mill.

Such buildings are part of the town's heritage. We notice the charm of a craftsman cottage or the elegance of a Queen Anne or a Victorian, but there's more than that within those walls. From oral history to the history books, though, it's our stories, personal and otherwise, that define us. The stories within the buildings are to a great extent what make a place what it is for all who live there.