Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Before there was a movie there was a novel -- a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. It is a novel about difficult subjects, a novel that would probably not do well today although it reflected the world that it was written about. How much of it is a true reflection? I am not scholar enough to say. So much has changed since this was published eighty-five years ago. It was controversial then, and it may be even more controversial now.
There was a time when the rebellious south stood as a symbol of independent thinking, when Robert E. Lee sat high atop his monument, and served as the moniker of a 1969 Dodge Charger in the Dukes of Hazard. Just in the past year that image has shifted to a traitorous point of view as the capital was stormed and the union was in jeopardy once again. The movie has been removed from HBO Max.
It's still a block buster of a novel, romantic fiction that puts all the novels with the sweaty bare chested men with a beautiful woman draped over them to shame. Scarlett O'Hara cannot be beaten as a heroine for the ages.
War is a nasty business no matter when or where. The civil war was no different. You cannot fight a war if you don't care about the outcome. Clearly the citizens of the Confederacy were passionate about their cause, and Margaret Mitchell portrays that through the character of Scarlett and the characters surrounding her. Even today (perhaps more so), it is difficult to set all the politics aside and just read this as a well written story. Scarlett is a fully developed and beautifully described character. Mitchell granted each and every character a clear and distinctive voice as they dance alongside death, devastation, and horror of the war. She wrote lyrical dialog, built up tension, and twisted in the cliff hangers for the sixty-three chapters.
I saw the movie years ago, but recently I was intrigued as I continue to hone my own writing skills to see how a master writes. A novel is a story first and foremost, and I certainly rode along with the tale. Scarlett is a maverick. She does things her own way - right or wrong, good or bad. She certainly doesn't make the right choices every time, but she doesn't sit on the sidelines and watch. Scarlett is one of those people who make the world turn. I think if romance fiction writers of today were compelled to read Gone with the Wind, we would have better novels.
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Second Law is Coming!
 I began working on Second Law, my next novel, at the beginning of April in 2020. It's actually the sixth novel that I have completed and I would like to think that it is a compendium of all the stuff I have learned along that path. All but three of those works reside in my file cabinet.
I typed my first novels on my IBM Selectric typewriter when I was living in NYC. I had the romantic vision of a young writer in the city, smoking a pipe and wearing a bow tie. The first one was about a young man who heads off to Labrador after leaving college. The second one was about a congressman who decided he didn't want to be a congressman any more and tried, unsuccessfully, to disappear in upstate New York. And the third one was about an architect who design a house for a drug dealer in Florida who had to be eliminated after the completion of the design.
RecalculatingTruth is about the development of a system to decipher the truth and lies without waterboarding. And Death at the Edge of the Diamond, the first Jon Megquire story is also generally available. In that book, Jon comes up to Cape Cod to play in the Cape Cod Baseball League and gets involved in solving a murder where the perpetrator uses the house as his weapon of choice.
Second Law tells of Jon returning to Cape Cod to attend a construction conference to find what he thinks might be his true path but his search is interrupted by having to solve the murder of a conference participant who is buried in insulating foam.
The launch date for the book is June 15, 2022 which seemed a very long time in the future, but is now less than five months away! If you are interested in reviewing advanced reader copies and helping me to get some reviews before the book comes out, I would welcome hearing from you. It would be a great help if you would pass the word and share this newsletter.
I'll keep you posted on the progress! |
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