The Love of a Good Man

I've had conversations with or emails from a few of you about my different story lines. Everyone has a different opinion! However, mostly you were all encouraging about any of the stories - saying they all sounded good. I'm torn between the "Harmony G.R.I.T.S." - because a few of you liked that idea, and the "Love of a Good Man" romance. Since I have already written a page or two of the Good Man story, I'm posting it below. After you've read that, you can let me know whether what I've written so far is appealing to you and you want to see where it goes, or whether it's not enough to "grab" you. Then we'll go from there. And I really do want to hear from you!

The Love of a Good Man (I'm still thinking about this title!)

Amanda Sparks scanned over the document with the judge's signature and then tossed it onto her cluttered desk. She didn't need to read the fine print to know that this was the final order for the dissolution of her marriage to Sami, her tall, dark Arabian prince as she had once called him affectionately, who had swept her off her feet only seven years earlier. Now the bloom was off the rose, the marriage over, and Amanda was on her own. She felt a mixture of relief and sadness. Sadness that the hopes she had when she married Sami never truly materialized, relief that the nightmare the marriage had become was over. But mostly Amanda simply felt at loose ends, unsure of what to do with herself now.

"Hey Sparky! Aren't you coming to the faculty party? It's time to celebrate!" Craig Jensen,Spanish professor in the Literature and Language department of the University of Chicago, had stuck his head into Amanda's office.He was one of a very few people who could get away with calling Amanda "Sparky," a nickname derived from both her last name and her flaming red hair.

Amanda smile in spite of her mood. "Of course, Craig, I'll be down in a minute. I just have a few things to wrap up here." Amanda had been an assistant professor at the University of Chicago since earning her Ph.D about a year after she and Sami married.Her specialty was contemporary literature and her classes were popular with the students, especially those who were not English majors but who needed literature classes to satisfy degree requirements. Not that her classes could be considered an easy "A." She had a reputation for being tough, but fair.

After Craig left for the party, Amanda turned to her computer. She needed to clear out her email files before closing up her office for the summer. Most of the emails were endless administrative dictates concerning graduation, turning in grades, etc. Those she scanned through quickly and deleted; none of them required a response. The last email was from her sister Colleen,who lived in west Texas on a small ranch with her husband and brood of three children.


To: Amanda Sparks
From: Colleen Walker

Subject: How ya doin'?

Hi Mandy,

I know you're divorce is coming through and just wanted to check in and see how you're doing. I hope that you're having a chance to heal from all of this and that Sami isn't giving you too much trouble about things. Let me know how you are. And if you're up for it, who not come out and spend a few weeks with us on the ranch? The west Texas sun and fresh air would do you a world of good. The kids would love to see their Aunt Mandy, and Tom could certainly use an extra pair of hands around the place!:)

Don't be sad. This will all work out for the best.

Love
Sis

Amanda smiled. Colleen always knew the right thing to say. That's why she had always relied on her sister for advice and encouragement. Colleen had been happily married to Tom Walker for fifteen years and Amanda envied her. She had found her place early and clung to it. She had not had the restlessness that Amanda had often felt.Amanda hit the "Reply" button and started typing.

Dear Sis,

Boy is your timing good! Just today I got the final dissolution of the marriage.It's official now; I'm a single woman again! I'm doing okay - I'm mostly relieved more than anything. Sami and I worked out a property settlement and everything outside of court so we only had to make a brief court appearance a few weeks ago. Since there are no children involved, it was pretty simple. It was all very "civil."

I appreciate the invitation to come out there, and don't think the idea of roping cattle with Tom isn't enticing!But I've actually made plans to "head to the hills." I'm going to head up to Townsend and do some exploring around the old homeplace in Cades Cove. I haven't been up there since we were kids and I'm curious about how things are up there. I may do some research and some writing about our mountain heritage. I don't know. I just wanted to get away from Chicago and the coolness of the Smokies just appealed to me (more than the "warmth" of west Texas!. I'm going to head home to visit with Mom and Dad for a few days before I go up there.

This will be my last email to you before I get to Townsend. I'll have my laptop with me, and assuming I can get a wireless connection in the mountains, I'll let you know when I get there and settled.

Love,
Mandy

Amanda shut down her computer. She only had a few more "official" duties for the semester. She knew she needed to go to the end-of-the semester faculty party, and graduation was the next day. All the professors were required to attend graduation. After putting a few personal items in a box and securing her office for the summer, she headed out to her car and loaded her stuff inside. Then she headed back into the Humanities building to attend the party and say goodbye to her colleagues.

And Away We Go!

Okay gang! As promised I'm posting below the synopses of several story ideas I have. A couple of them I already have begun some preliminary writing and I may post that as well. I was pleasantly surprised when I went back into my files to find these story ideas as I had forgotten some of them (glad I wrote them down!). And I realized that those stories still appeal to me. I have eclectic interests - historical fiction; "romance" type stories (but always with a twist); something I like to call "social justice" literature - stories that address issues that people deal with in their daily lives and the choices they have to make; mysteries; character-driven stories that are fun reads. I'm not necessarily about always having to strive for the great definitive work of the century - a light, quick summer read - a book you can take to the beach with you is every bit as important as "significant" works like War and Peace!

As I mentioned in my first entry, the serial novel I wrote for the newspaper essentially wrote itself. I've come up with these synopses, however, I don't have them fully fleshed out - I may know how they begin, but I'm unclear as to how they end,or vice versa. They will be organic books - the writing journey will be about the story finding its own way - not me trying to drive it in a particular direction. That's why I think it'll be fun to have your input - perhaps the story will go in a whole different direction then I originally thought just from an idea put forth by one of the blog readers.

So after I've posted a few story ideas (with some background notes), it'll be your job to help me decide which one to start on. And then that story will be what I'll serialize in this blog. Once you've decided which one you like, either enter your decision in the comments section (click on "Comments" at the end of the post), or you can email your selection to me at joycejackson06@comcast.net. Or if you have my phone number you can call me!

Now you have to promise to help with this decision. Please try to respond by August 4.

Here we go!

Story Idea 1: The Harmony G.R.I.T.S. Social Club

This would (hopefully!) be a light fun read about a group of women in the small town of Harmony Tennessee who get together on a regular basis for social outings and service projects, but who usually end up in some kind of mischief. G.R.I.T.S. is an acronym I first found on a tee-shirt in a Cracker Barrel years ago and stands for "Girls Raised in the South." Most of my women friends object to being called "girls" but the ladies of Harmony are more traditional and have no problem with being referred to as "the girls" - even if they're well into adulthood! I chose the town name of Harmony to create an obvious bad pun concerning that food staple of the south "hominy grits." Get it? I know...it's bad - but fun! The five main members of the social club are Linell, Doreen, Faith, and twins Patsy and Palis (short for "Palestine" - and yes - I did actually know a woman with that name!). The tag line for at least the first book (assuming this could become a series) is "The girls were up to something...and Harmony Tennessee might never be the same."

Story Idea 2: The Love of a Good Man (definitely a working title)

This story is a bit more fleshed out - a pretty like synopses here that I wrote some time ago and I even have a good start on the first chapter, which I may include in a future entry. I like this storyline, but don't let that influence you. It is a "sophisticated" romance novel - no heaving bosoms (unless you clamor for them!) or Fabio type models - but a romance nonethe less. I got inspired to write this after making a long overdue visit to the Great Smokey Mountains, in particular the Cades Cove area. For those of you who have been up there, you'll recognize some of the landmarks. Here's the storyline:

Amanda Sparks, Ph.D. in English literature and professor at University of Chicago faces the dissolution of her marriage to a man from another culture (Indian, Iranian?) who divorces her because she doesn’t act the dutiful wife as his customs dictate. It’s the end of the spring semester and she isn’t teaching during the summer, so she decides to go “home.” While she was raised in Nashville TN, she was born in Townsend, near her ancestral home in Cades Cove at the base of the Smoky Mountains. Her family moved to Nashville while she was still an infant, but she went back often as a child to visit relatives who still lived in the area. As her heart heals from the wounds of the marriage and she struggles to find herself, she finds herself being pulled back to the place of her ancestors. She rents a cabin in Townsend by the Little Pigeon River and spends a lot of time exploring the Cove. She’s visiting the site of her ancestral home and reading the grave markers of ancestors when she is startled by the arrival of Clint Shields (?). Clint is descended from another of the ancestral Cove families and has stayed in the area his whole life. While not educated in the same way Amanda is, he is charming, has “horse sense” and a deep abiding love for his mountain roots. He runs a horse camp during the tourist season and during the winter months he spends time in a wood shop where he carves beautiful wood sculptures that reflect images of the area. He’s struggling to raise a teen-age daughter alone after they were abandoned by his wife, a Cherokee woman who wanted to find the exciting life in big cities. Amanda has her guard up regarding any new relationships but does acquiesce when Clint offers to take her on a horse back ride through some of the mountain passages. She promises herself that she isn’t going to “fall” for a guy just because she feels vulnerable. Plus she’s always had a prejudice against “good old boys”. But she finds that she’s irresistibly attracted to Clint and she begins to reflect on how bad her previous relationships and her marriage have been in which she always sought out people as different from her family and the boys she grew up with as possible. She keeps up a running dialogue with her sister through email about this, and her sister points out that as a teen she had said she wanted someone like her sister’s husband, who is a classic “good old boy.” Her sister, through the emails, urges Amanda to not be so hard on herself or on the possibilities with Clint. Perhaps she should try a “good old boy” this time. In the meanwhile, Amanda is continuously exploring the cove to come to terms with her roots, and she finds herself inviting Clint’s daughter along to teach her as well, and to offer some adult female mentoring. They go on hikes through the mountains as they discover themselves as women and as friends, sometimes taking Clint along, most times not. Clint becomes a little jealous of the budding relationship between the woman and young girl and argues with Amanda – and they avoid each other, with Amanda being told to stay away from his daughter. Amanda takes this as a cue to leave the cove and as she is making ready to return to Chicago, having given up on becoming a part of the mountain culture, she hears word that Clint is missing somewhere in the mountains. She and his daughter join the search party and after a couple of days in the mountains, they are the ones to rescue him. “True love” blooms, all is forgiven, and Amanda resigns her position in Chicago and takes a teaching position at Maryville College. She and Clint are married in the cabin where his family lived for generations and Amanda becomes part of the cove culture once again after find “the love of a good man.”

Story Idea 3 - Stars in Heaven Trilogy

This is actually an idea for a series of 3 book along the lines of the Mitford Series. If you know anything about this set of books - they are set in the small town of Mitford and feature a minister named Father Tim. They are just nice books that are a joy to read- no sex, drugs, or violence, nothing dark or sinister - just good readable books.

I have in mind to have a similar series of books that have titles based on a favorite quote of mine from the Baha'i writings. The quote reads "Ye are the stars in the heaven of understanding, the breeze that stirreth at the break of day, the soft-flowing waters upon which must depend the very life of all men." Here's the synopses I wrote for this trilogy some time ago. Obviously I would only be starting with the first one.

In a small to mid-size Tennessee town (think Murfreesboro), an interracial and interfaith group of women meet weekly as a prayer group. A more eclectic group of women would not have been found anywhere else in the South. Who could have guessed that in little Bonita Springs, Tennessee, where resistance to the end of slavery was legend and where die-hard Rebels still flew the stars and bars, six women of such diverse backgrounds and different faiths would become friends, indeed sisters?

Book 1: Heaven of Understanding - the women are horrified to learn that a local church building has been sold to someone who intends to turn it into a strip club. They set about working to stop it. They are met with resistance, especially from the business group that wants the plans to proceed. There are threats and even one attempt on one member's life. The women are undaunted and continue working until they're able to find a way to purchase the building, which they then turn into a: after-school program? charter school? free clinic? family community ed center? relief agency for runaway teens or abused women?

Book 2: The Breeze that Stirreth - Racism has to be addressed again when a Kurdish family moves into the area and is immediately vicitmized by a number of people. The women work to bring relief to the family, while addressing their own fears of the "unknown" and remembering the civil rights struggle of the 60s.

Book 3: Soft-Flowing Waters - After a heated discussion about monuments to war dead, war in general, and mothers being forced to sacrifice their sons (one woman has a son in Iraq), the women take up the project of creating a "peace monument" (peace pole?) to counter act the Civil War monument which was recently erected.

Getting Serious About Writing

I have stories running through my head all of the time! Usually in the middle of a restless night I formulate an entire story - sometimes I'm wise and get out of bed to write my ideas down - other times not so much. I work as an editor and writer for a living, so I am immersed in the act of writing daily - but usually for the organizations I work for - specific, technical, nonfiction type stuff. It's a living, but not the kind of writing I want to do. I've read voraciously since I first learned to read, and have dreamed of coming up with my own stories that others would want to read. In the 5th grade I wrote a class play based on the "Little House" books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and produced and directed the play for our class(Thank you Mrs. Ayres for allowing me that artistic freedom!). As a young adolescent I spent most of my spare time writing voluminously - long "novels" about the heartthrob(s) of the day and my fortunate interactions with them. My girlfriends couldn't wait for me to read the next installment to them on how the four of us each ended up with our favorite Monkee!

But as I got older and became an adult, for some reason the pastime of writing stopped. I focused on papers for school, and then as a young married woman with two young sons, I just couldn't get back to the writing. But it stayed there - the DESIRE - and I continued to ruminate in my mind-wandering moments about characters, plot twists, settings, etc. I continued to read in every spare moment, but often found myself annoyed with the quality of the writing of a particular book and would arrogantly spout "I could write something better than that!" But I never did.

Now I am a grandmother (albeit a young one!) and while still working with words, find the pull of creative writing getting ever stronger. I still have some great stories or story ideas, and a lot of them I have actually written down - or even started. I did write and publish the story of my son Hayden's life - but that's nonfiction, and while creatively written and well received, still not what I really want to do. I have a full length novel - a historical romantic fiction - that I completed some years ago but that still needs to be "fleshed out" and it is the circumstances under which I wrote that novel that has led me to the idea for this Creative Writing blog.

Back in 1998 or so, I was feeling the same need to find the discipline to write when a friend approached me about the little bi-weekly newspaper he published in Watertown,Tennessee. Tony told me that he was always looking for "filler" for the Watertown Gazette and since I was a writer did I want to contribute anything? There isn't a whole lot going on in Watertown, and "hard" news was difficult to come by - so he was not averse to having creative writing in his little newspaper.

I thought about it for a while and realized that this was a perfect way to force me to write! I would write a "serial" novel - with a chapter published in each issue of the newspaper. I would have a deadline, which would force me to produce. I asked Tony if he was willing to devote some columns in each issue of the paper to a serial novel, and he was more than happy to agree to the idea. There wasn't any money involved in this - I knew I wouldn't be getting paid - but it would make me work on my writing, and it would make me a "published" author!

I knew I would need to write something that would be of interest to the citizens of Watertown. Something that would hold their interest and have them looking forward to the next issue of the newspaper. What happened next is something I still don't understand. I began researching the history of Watertown to get a sense of the community and an idea for the story line. After reading some interesting stories about the origins of Watertown and some of its citizens in the 19th century, an idea slowly began to gel. I formulated some basic characters but didn't really have any idea what the story would be or where it would go - I just started sketching out a few central characters. Before I knew it - the story was writing itself. I never really plotted out the whole novel - never made an outline or drew a genealogy of my main characters. I just started writing, and the story told itself!

Tony reported to me that the story was generating interest and that people were telling him that they were enjoying it and looked forward to the next installment. This was a relief, for I chose a fairly controversial topic to weave into the story and the heroine of the story ,"Jewel," was a biracial child who grew up into a strong woman who runs her own horse ranch. Given where Watertown is situated, the fact that the newspaper office wasn't torched because of the story line to me was huge sign of acceptance!

The "rest of the story" about this serial novel I'll save for another time, but for some reason it just occured to me that I needed to find another incentive, another way to go about writing creatively on a regular basis that would hold me accountable - like the deadlines that Tony imposed on me for the serial novel. With the world of blogging growing by leaps and bounds, I hit upon the idea of dusting off some of these story ideas that I have, presenting either a synopsis of the proposed story or any actual writing I've actually done on the story to my blog readers. Then you all can decide which story I should start working on first. I'll promise to provide a block of writing at least once a week for everyone's review and (hopefully!) enjoyment, and maybe if I get really ambitious, you'll get more than once a week installments!

Now....here's where the really fun part comes in. This is going to be a cooperative effort. A lot of you who are reading this are writers yourselves, and even if you're not - this is a part of the group dynamic that will make this fun. After each installment, you all will be invited to submit ideas to me about where the story should go, character development, new characters or plot twists, settings, etc. There may be times when I will specifically ask - what should happen next? or perhaps I'll whine "I'm stuck here...what do you think should happen,? etc. Even if I don't specifically ask, you will be invited to provide any kind of feedback or input to the story that you see fit.

I won't promise that I'll actually use all or even any of the ideas that are offered to me along the way. But the goal is to see a book come out of this exercise that is potentially publishable. If I use any one's ideas, I'll give credit to that person (but you won't be able to claim any royalties!)

There's a secondary goal here - to encourage you to start writing as well! Maybe by feeding me ideas for my story, you'll get motivated to start writing yourself. All of my readers will also be encouraged to send in "submissions" for all of the blog readers to read, and I'll happily post them to the blog in a special section. That way - we're all getting creative!

Sound like fun? I hope so, because I'm staying up until 1 a.m. to write this initial entry because I'm so excited about it! It's too late to do it now, but in my next entry I'm going to provide the outlines of several story ideas I have, and in some cases I will have already written a few paragraphs. You'll be able to "vote" on which story gets your attention and that you think I should work on first.

Time for the writing adventure to start!