The Birth of a Book

It all started when...

I wanted to let my BBS group to "hear" the sound of the southern dialect. I began by writing sentences phonetically, so that, if they read it aloud, they would "hear" the southern drawl.

During the ensuing discussion, I mentioned the fact that white southern speech and black southern speech, although similar, are very different—especially to a southerner.

This is where "KEECHIE" was born. I invented (created?) an old half-breed Indian woman whose father (a black man) taught her to speak "white man's language".

I used the 1950's south as the setting, since that was when and where I grew up—listening to the old black men tell stories as they sat around the pot-bellied stove in my dad's old country store. If you have ever read the "Uncle Remus" stories by Joel Chandler Harris, or have seen the movies, Song of the South or The Color Purple, then you already have an idea of the sound of their voices.

The first few paragraphs that I wrote, inserting Keechie's words into dialogue, captivated my BBS group—and they wanted more! So it became a short story.

Then something almost magical happened—my main character, Keechie, took over! It was as if she wanted her story told, and the short story became a 46,000 word novel. Then came the sequel, which is in progress—at 80,000 words and still not finished!

At my book's website http://www.freewebs.com/brew99 there is a sample chapter of KEECHIE to read, so you can get an idea of what I'm trying to describe. (There's even a bio there with a picture of me (I had the make-up department make me look really old).