First Frost
It's been a while since I logged into Good Reads. I've been busy with real-world book promotion, finishing a new novel, and an otherwise active life, which leaves little time for the virtual.
But I feel I must stop in once again to thank those folks who've taken the time to read Dove Creek and to comment on it. One thing about having a book published, the adult in you very quickly has to take over, lest the inner child who is so happy to see herself between covers ruin your life with her dismay over readers who don't see your story the way you wanted them to.
Mostly I want to prevent alarm on the behalf of any of my stray family members who happen upon random Internet reviews. For some reason, some people are mistaking Patricia Faye Morrison's story for my own. Obviously I anticipated this happening, anyone who writes a fictional memoir does, which is why I wrote my parents a 3-page letter to accompany their copy of the book, explaining which things happened to my protagonist that did not happen to me.
One day I will write my true memoir. I have a proposal into an agent now. It is all about growing up in Indiana, smart but poor and cast as a religious zealot, while seeing the world from an angle no one else could understand. This last part is not unusual. It is what makes some of us into poets, artists, and fiction writers.
It will take until then, I suppose, for readers to understand the eons of difference between Patricia Faye and me and that Patricia belongs to an imagined world based on that of my grandparents, not mine. Some of her adventures are a re-imagining of things I witnessed over decades of living and travelling and some are purely imagined.
It's funny. Writers come under fire for fictionalizing their non-fiction, and, as I am finding, writing fiction derived from real events. These are questions I never stop to ask when I read a book. I am naive, I suppose, accepting what the author gives me at face value.
Nonetheless, to my unwitting relatives who happen across some of these untrusting reviewers, if you have any questions, please call my mother. She has my phone number.
But I feel I must stop in once again to thank those folks who've taken the time to read Dove Creek and to comment on it. One thing about having a book published, the adult in you very quickly has to take over, lest the inner child who is so happy to see herself between covers ruin your life with her dismay over readers who don't see your story the way you wanted them to.
Mostly I want to prevent alarm on the behalf of any of my stray family members who happen upon random Internet reviews. For some reason, some people are mistaking Patricia Faye Morrison's story for my own. Obviously I anticipated this happening, anyone who writes a fictional memoir does, which is why I wrote my parents a 3-page letter to accompany their copy of the book, explaining which things happened to my protagonist that did not happen to me.
One day I will write my true memoir. I have a proposal into an agent now. It is all about growing up in Indiana, smart but poor and cast as a religious zealot, while seeing the world from an angle no one else could understand. This last part is not unusual. It is what makes some of us into poets, artists, and fiction writers.
It will take until then, I suppose, for readers to understand the eons of difference between Patricia Faye and me and that Patricia belongs to an imagined world based on that of my grandparents, not mine. Some of her adventures are a re-imagining of things I witnessed over decades of living and travelling and some are purely imagined.
It's funny. Writers come under fire for fictionalizing their non-fiction, and, as I am finding, writing fiction derived from real events. These are questions I never stop to ask when I read a book. I am naive, I suppose, accepting what the author gives me at face value.
Nonetheless, to my unwitting relatives who happen across some of these untrusting reviewers, if you have any questions, please call my mother. She has my phone number.
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