The story hits Amazon.com here in the next week or so as Saving Magnolia. It has nothing to do with Scott Jensen, or a radio talk show based in Dallas or of a production company. Radio is still a major component in the story as is Dallas, as is Chillicothe, Ohio. The story has changed considerably and has expanded from roughly 35,000 to over twice that many words.
In this and another blog or two, I'm going to trace some of the threads which have eventually led to the story in the physical book, as well as some background on Magnolia and a few other characters which will be introduced in some succeeding books (The Magnolia Chronicles - The Magnolia Connection - The Secret of Possum Hollow).
WRITING -
I've stated elsewhere that I have always written. Storytelling is in my DNA. My maternal Grandfather was one of the best story tellers I have ever encountered. He was full of them from experience. For instance, he had vivid recollections of his involvement in WWI. My father once stated that Leo Eddy never told the same story twice - a creditable achievement since the gentleman would have been excused for doing so in the later years of his life.
My father told stories more than once, but they were repeated as command performances, not as senile ramblings. It was not until nearly 20 years after my father's passing that I received a packet of stories he actually wrote down on paper. One of them, a short story Death and Llewellyn may make it to a collection of short stories I am contemplating publishing. Despite what I see as a time frame error, the story is charming and funny in its own way.
I picked up on telling stories somewhat early in my life. The older I got, the larger the repertoire. It got to the point where I needed to put some of my stories down on paper in preparation of becoming the senile old man who spends most of his time chasing the neighborhood kids off of his lawn.
When I was in college, I took a class in script writing. We were given a form and an assignment to come up with a half-hour television script. In that assignment, I sowed the seeds which would eventually lead to Magnolia, Ohio and one of the characters in Saving Magnolia, Steve Mulligan. The script was a situation comedy I called Chuck's Bargain Center. Steve was a worker in a small store in a small southern Ohio town. The proprietor was an Italian immigrant (working on a stereotype, here) who spent his days trying to make an honest living despite Steve and Steve's girlfriend, Katy. The script contained a lot of slapstick and a lot of "Mamma mia!", but it did earn me a B for the project and the course.
Chuck's Bargain Center was based on the Piketon Bargain Center, an ill-fated venture by one of my bosses to take over and run a small run-down grocery store. My boss's name was Tyrone Hemry - one of my fellow employees at the radio station where we worked imagined radio commercials for Tyrone, calling him Tyrone - just call me Chuck - Hemry. Chuck stuck, as did the name of my co-worker (Steve) and his girlfriend, later wife, later ex, Katy. Those characters and the script stuck with me for over 25 years, as did memories from working at radio station WIBO in Waverly, Ohio.
When I started pulling the final scenarios which eventually became Saving Magnolia, I took a look back at Steve, Katie, Chuck and The Bargain Center to be part and parcel of my story. Steve became an assistant football coach to Coach Chuck - a character based on a coach and health teacher I had been familiar with when I was in high school. Katie and The Bargain Center were gone. I explained what happened in a short story which is integrated into The Magnolia Chronicles. Steve Mulligan is too good a character not to have in a story set in a small town in southern Ohio - and too important a character as it ends up, to relegate a role in only one story.
Katie and Chuck return, too - but The Bargain Center is long gone - victim of neglect and the building of a different kind of general store later in the series.
Back to the chase.
In the years between being a student at Ohio University and deciding to write a long-form story, I got a lot of experience writing in thirty to sixty second bursts. Those bursts were radio commercials.
Now, radio commercials are not as easy to write as one might think. For one thing, one has to put a lot of information into a short amount of time, so, the key is more repetition of key points than it is going over a laundry list. The second thing to remember is that the person paying for the ad wants to be proud of what he is buying so that he'll buy more in the long run. I'm proud to say that I have been able to write and produce radio ads which not only attracted attention from the audience, but kept clients happy that they were getting results.
Still, while writing successful advertising, I had the idea of writing in long-form rattling around in the back of my head. I needed a catalyst. By 2010 I had that catalyst and was ready to give it a try.
This is a good stopping point. I will be back with more later, tracing Scott Jensen, old girlfriends and the point at which I decided to make a self-indulgent story into something resembling a real novel.
Be Seeing You!
bdharrell
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