WHY AM I A WRITER?

                                        Me last month at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China

            Yesterday as I was coming out of my apartment, an elderly neighbor of mine  said he had a question for me . (Actually I should watch how I use that word elderly because someone might confuse it with me. I keep telling people there is nothing old about me except my birth certificate.)

            Oh, well, on with the story. Joe asked me as he hobbled on his walker in my direction, “Have you ever written a novel?”

            “Yes, I have,” I answered sprightly.

            “I’ve got a story for you that’ll make us a million dollars. It’s a great story. It’s about World War II.”

            I quickly swung into my usual song and dance about my schedule being too full to take on any new projects. Thank goodness his wife Trudy came out of their apartment and dragged him back in.

            You see, everywhere I go when people find out that I’m a writer, I get the squeeze put on me.  The barber, the waiter, the doctor and anyone else whose path I cross in any one day. You see, it goes like this: They want me to write the book (no minor undertaking, mind you) and then they want all the profits or will give you a few bucks to tide you over between gigs—IF their fabulous story miraculously ever were to run into  a paycheck. I always tell these people they should write the book themselves. They without a doubt look at me as though I just said the most ridiculous thing imaginable. I’m the one who is supposed to pave their way to fame and fortune. Oh well, I just get myself steeled for the next one to pop the question.

            I got to thinking after Joe tried to interest me in that great WW II idea nesting in his brain: Why am I a writer?

            In one way, it’s an easy answer. My heritage is the South where telling tall tales is just naturally the way of life and so many people transfer their anecdotes on paper and manage to sell them. I had several writers in my family so it seemed pretty usual for people to apply words to paper. A cousin of mine who published many short stories said, “Just talk to the paper like you would an interested pair of ears.” So, that’s what I did. I was quite good it seemed in recounting my fellowman’s foibles, which incidentally I call “serious circus”.

            When my brother and I were small (even though he was older) our mother always made me go to the store to pick up things. Why? Because when I returned, not only could I pass along all the town gossip I’d overheard, but I could tell her what people were wearing and if they looked happy or sad.  My brother did not get the tittle-tattle Southern gene so he was a washout in those departments.

            See, that’s how writers come about. You actually dictate gossip and the like to yourself. If you’re good at hearsay and tittle-tattle, you’ll probably make a good writer. I  (I don’t know why Joe can’t write his own book because he and his wife run a pretty good gossip machine where I live.)

            After a fertile childhood of listening to scandal and other types of talk, you go to school where you learn attitudes. This is a word which basically means likes and dislikes. Many people have no outlet for their attitudes except via the telephone or most recently emails, texting and iPad Scrabble, so since they don’t write, they end up becoming a Mean Melanie or a Spiteful Sam.  What they fail to realize is IF they wrote, they could take all that rage out on a piece of paper.

            So I think you kind of get the idea of why I am a writer. It kind of keeps me a person’s person and helps me keep my eye on the doughnut instead of the hole.  It’s a really healthy hobby, not to mention a wonderful profession if you can persevere through all the rejection and actually see a few paychecks roll in.

            I heartedly recommend it as opposed to paying a therapist wads of money for telling you what you want to hear. “But I’ve got issues,” you tell yourself. That’s great. Slug them out on a piece of paper and create a career.

            Sorry it was so long between blogs. I am writing another novel at the moment and that takes a lot of my time putting all that blathering down on paper.

            See you next blog—which I’m hoping will be soon.

            

Hello again from THE WRITER GUY. I guess I call myself that because I’ve been writing for most of my life. I actually started writing for the first time when I was about 7 years old. My aunt Nanny Lou was visiting us in Okolona, Mississippi, from her home in Asheville, North Carolina. She was a poet—not only in actuality but in her matter of being as well in the way she dressed. She was just 100% poetical. I used to be amazed at a fox fur piece she slung around her shoulders in a dramatic way to emphasize one thing or another. I once asked her if it was expensive and she explained to me she had bought it for a quarter at a thrift shop. “A perfectly good fur for a quarter,” she used to say as she gave it a poetic flip.

On that particular visit I was showing her that I could write. She seemed quite impressed and she introduced me to what a play was. She and I wrote my very first play, which was called “The Funny Grasshopper”.  She, my father and I read the three parts while my grandmother listened and watched with a stony look on her face. (She was a very practical, no-nonsense woman—French.) Embedded here you will see my aunt along with a photo of my brother and me (I'm the younger one) about the time I wrote the grasshopper play.

So from grasshoppers, in due course, I went on to writing plays about people. I wrote my first people play called GOOD GRIEF when I was a senior in high school. That fall when I attended Mississippi State University, I persuaded the drama group to put it on. My brother was the stage manager and during the course of the production, he got smitten with one of the stars of my chef d’oeuvre, a budding college actress by the name of Etta Mae. There was much talk of marriage but eventually they married others. However, via the magic of Amway fifty years later, they re-discovered one another and, believe it or not, got married. Ah, the power of writing.

I went on eventually to Paris, France, every writer’s dream. I remained there ten years and founded The Paris English Theatre, where 9 of my plays were first produced. (They’ve been produced everywhere since then.) All sorts of magic happened in those ten years. I got jobs to work on screenplays, mainly with an Italian-Mexican producer by the name of Giuseppe HIbler, which resulted in three films eventually being made: Beethoven’s Nephew, La Nuit de Varennes and Over Her Dead Body. All my Paris adventures are in a book of mine entitled PARIS PLAYS. It is an anthology of 8 of my plays which first saw the light of day in Paris—plus a commentary on what inspired me to write each of those plays, who the characters were in real life and generally what the author really meant—which should help students out immeasurably.  The book is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and on order from any bookstore.

I returned to the USA and worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter for hire in the film industry until I retired to Palm Springs, CA where I turned my attention to writing books.  My fourth book just went “live” last week on amazon and bn and as of today they are available on Kindle, Nook, iPad , Sony reader, and all the usual suspects.  I think you have to use the ISBN number 978-1-4620-60-50-4 to call the book up on these ebook sites. The name of the book is TEDDY BEAR MURDERS: The Four Deadly Hellos. I’m busy as can be trying to get the word out about it. I’d really love to count you as one of my helpers in this quest. To find more, you can go to my web site at www.jackfitzgerald.com  or you can click on the photo to your right showing me with a group of Cuban Rebels during the revolution there in 1958. One click and it should magically whiz you right to my site.  (I’ll go into Cuba in a future blog.)

More next week on events and happenings in my life as a writer which I hope you might find interesting.  Best to you. Hope to see you here next week. Also, I’m on Facebook. Twitter I’m still wrestling with. I’m there but not with much bravura. 

JACK IS BACK!

Facebook.com

Jack is back with his blog at http://vivaevolucion.blogspot.com.

THE WRITING GUY

On the occasion of my latest book (TEDDY BEAR MURDERS) going live last Thursday, I've been thinking that you might like to hear from me again.

Apparently a great number of people have a new book out these days. Today Chris Matthews' book on JFK went live--plus goodness knows how many other books have been born since just last Thursday, each struggling for readers. I don't think Chris will have a terrible time as he has a TV show and lots of exposure, including TIME magazine.

So many of us are out there with product and it is not easy trying to get someone to even notice that you exist, much less that you are alive. I read a figure the other day of how many new books are published every year. It's become an interesting phenomenon that we have more books than ever and fewer people reading them. It's like cook books. Have you gone to a bookstore like Barnes and Noble and seen how many food preparation books there are? Yet fewer people are cooking than ever. You can't call putting a TV dinner in the microwave cooking in the real sense and you certainly don't need a cook book for that.

In the recent past, let's say in the early 80s, there weren't all these books out there struggling for your credit card. Many people in those days said, "I'm going to write a book," Someone might have even said to another person, "You ought to write a book about that." Perhaps they even said,"You've lived such an interesting life. You should write a book."

Most people if they tried gave up after chapter 1. Others got about half-way through and jumped authorship. Some may have even finished and saw that re-writes and editing were like a verbal Mt. Everest to conquer.  Then those who persevered found that trying to interest an agent was as elusive as finding the cure to cancer. Some even went the route of sending their book off to a publisher where it went into hibernation for six months and was returned with coffee stains on it.

What happened to cause so many new books each and every day? The computer, that's what, and Microsoft Word and Print On Demand technology. In the past if  you made an error typing, you were in caca. You had to either re-type the page or try and erase the error. Then super technology entered the picture and someone came up with some little white sheets of paper which you could strike over. That was thought of as a miracle. Then that changed to liquid whiteout, which was considered fabulous. Then before you know it, someone invented word processing. All of a sudden you could correct to your heart's content and to add icing to the cake, you had spell check.

People began writing like nobody's business. Suddenly there were more books being produced--mainly by self-publishing vanity presses. You'd pay a big amount to have your book printed and stored somewhere and hope that you had the marketing skills to place a few of your books in friends and family's hands. Then somebody (and I don't know who, but they were geniuses) invented Print On Demand publishing. This means that a computerized printer can print one copy or a hundred of your book with the simple push of a button. Publishers no longer had need of large warehouses and the like. So all of a sudden POD publishers began springing up by the dozens. Now there are tons of them. They can design the cover of your book, do the interior layout, feed it into their wonder machine and presto, you will have a great-looking book in minutes. Some say that with Amazon.com when you press the button to buy the book, your purchase is linked to one of these super machines and it spits out your book in a flash, prints the receipt, packages it and dumps it on the conveyer belt for the post office.

So, here is Jack with his new book--trying to interest you and God knows who into taking a peek at his fourth book. He wrote CONTESSA as one of the first POD books in 1999 and it did quite well. It is a fake "as told to" autobiography of a famous actress (think Joan Crawford) who retires and tells her fans in her tell all that she started out in life as a man--and how she kept it a secret over the years.

Then PARIS PLAYS came along three years later and that contained 8 of my plays which were first produced in Paris, France, where I had founded The Paris English Theatre. Generally people are interested in how one came about writing a play. I tell the reader in this book where I got the idea for the play and after whom the characters were fashioned.

Then last year I came out with VIVA LA EVOLUCION. Granted it has a title in Spanish but the book is definitely written in English. It deals with this country going from dumb to dumber and the reason for it. Our drinking water has been polluted by mega corporations and our ordinary citizens are being literally turned into apes.

Now I have this new book out as of last Thursday--TEDDY BEAR MURDERS. This is like a return to Agatha Christie via Miss Marple. I know when I was in college many  years ago at Mississippi State University, there was a highly unusual series of murders committed in the area. I kept thinking about the situation for years and finally wrote this book which explains it all.

So, Jack's back--pitching his hat in the ring with the thousand other books that were released last week. I'd love it if you'd help mine have a life and not die in its infancy. Of course it's available on www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com. In a short time it will be live on Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, and other eBooks.

Best to you and I'll have another article next week. I hope you'll join me and tell your friends about Jack and his new book TEDDY BEAR MURDERS.

VIVA LA EVOLUCION MEETS CONTESSA

BRINGING YOU UP TO DATE.......

I've been meaning to get around to having more to say about VIVA LA EVOLUCION since the book came out a little over a year ago. The problem is I had no idea what was waiting around the corner for me. I wish I could say we were talking about glad tidings but unfortunately that wasn't the case. I guess the most charitable thing I can say concerning the period is it gave me more fodder about which to write.

First of all, last year I was coming home from seeing a movie with friends. I went to my car, got in and intended to be home in about ten minutes. This was not to be. You see, Palm Springs (California) where I live has a woman who owns a horse and carriage and she provides tourists with rides for a price. This particular night she turned left at a stop sign with no arrow (obviously letting the horse do the driving while she gave out running commentaries to her clients). Unfortunately I crossed the intersection and ran into the horse. What a nightmare to see a gigantic animal in your windshield. Fortunately the horse was not hurt but my car was. It took $8,000 to repair it. The horse was judged at fault and cited because it initiated a left turn without waiting for oncoming traffic to first pass.

Then shortly after that I came down with a case of Shingles. I don't know if you are familiar with what they are but I hope you're not. They are the most disagreeable form of a skin condition. Your nerves become extremely sensitive and you are a wreck. It took me three months to get over them.

Then a very close friend of mine took seriously ill and before we all knew it, he died. I could say passed on or some other euphunism but John was the type who didn't much like B. S. being called whipped cream. Anyway, what a loss.He was a retired actor from Hollywood and a great friend.

Then as if that wasn't enough, I fell down some steps and fractured my hip. I am presently getting over that. Hopefully my spell of misfortune has come to a close. So, sorry that I couldn't talk over VIVA LA EVOLUCION with you during my dry spell.

I am back--maybe not with a vengeance--but I'm getting things back on the front burner. This includes another new book which has been delayed by at least three months to the publishers. More about that one in a month or so. Let me try to sort all these other things out first.

VIVA LA EVOLUCION when it first came out was I thought going to set the woods on fire. To my surprise it didn't seem to catch an audience as fast as my other books. I tried to figure out why. At first I thought it was due to satire and especially political and social satire no longer being front-burner tickets. Once I had some feedback and talked with several people (especially at a book signing at Barnes & Noble), chit-chat had it that I might be as hot as a Havana chili pepper concerning the liberal/progressive movement in our country but my audience wasn't. Unfortunately the Republicans had stolen their mojo somehow and both they and President Obama had become as tepid as a bowl of cold oatmeal. Right string but wrong yo yo as my traveling salesman uncle used to say. There wasn't a thing wrong with VIVA LA EVOLUCION according to the majority of people who read it, In fact, they had great things to say about it. However, getting the general population off their dusters to buy a copy was something else--and my dealing with a lot of bad luck didn't make matters better.

Anyway, I'd like to encourage you to read VIVA LA EVOLUCION and help give it the life it deserves. As an added bonus, it can now be purchased as an electronic book for $9.99 on Kindle, Nook and iPad. I hope you will give it a run and then let me know what you think of it. I'd be very appreciative.

I started another blog today concerning another of my books CONTESSA. It has had a very good run and lots of positive feedback. It is having a resurgence of popularity at the moment and I would like to encourage you to become a part of it. Its address is http://ContessaUpdate.blogspot.com.

In order to get your interest, I've pasted some information below that appeared in a West Hollywood CA journal this week.

My best to you and I promise I won't wait a whole year for you to have word of me again. I'd say this time it will be a week or ten days at most. So, here's some information about my book CONTESSA.

CONTESSA: A Bombshell of an "as told to" book.

A brisk, witty fictional autobiography of a mega film star’s surprising road to fame.

The novel CONTESSA is the fictional, as-told-to autobiography of a famous film and theater mega star who recounts for the first time her early years leading up to international stardom.

This popular film star confesses how she started out in life as a man who knew from a very early age that he was really a “she” locked in the body of a “he”. His major problem was his father, an Arkansas bootlegger and local godfather, whose idea of a cure for his son’s affliction would be a lobotomy. The son escapes and his road to womanhood and subsequent fame is a tale of strength, courage, intrigue and adventure. CONTESSA examines the life trials of a young man who realizes that the keys to freedom for him must be fought for one by one.

This highly unusual book spotlights the bigotry, ignorance, self-righteousness and absurdity society forces certain of its members to endure. At the end of the book, Contessa questions what her life would have been like if she had remained a man. “Where would I be today? What kind of life would I have led all these years? How happy would I be today?”

The Rambles Literary Review states: “The basic idea behind this book is fascinating. The exploration of the conflict experienced by young Clyde / Contessa is handled exceptionally well, and this character is an alluring, engaging figure. The experiences of violence, sexual prejudice and lack of reason are shocking, and, I feel, quite realistic in their nature. Underneath it all, CONTESSA conveys a great message of social significance.”

The Lambda Book Report says, “Imagine if one of your favorite female movie stars was revealed to have begun life as a man. That is the premise of Jack Fitzgerald’s novel. And an impressive read it is. Fast paced, his story is filled with some of the most colorful, memorable and unforgettable characters I’ve come across in a long time. CONTESSA is not only a fascinating page-turner but would make a very significant film.”

Jack Fitzgerald is also the author of two other books: PARIS PLAYS and VIVA LA EVOLUCION. He lived for ten years in France where he founded The Paris English Theatre. He is the author of many stage plays and screenplays.

The International Herald Tribune writes, “Fitzgerald has an uncanny knack of capturing American types and speech. It is in their conversations and present-day mores that Fitzgerald’s talent shines.”

A POST FROM JACK, THE AUTHOR OF CONTESSA.

The world of transgender people has changed for the better in the last twenty years. Up until the early 1990s, a transsexual was someone who for the most part had to hid themselves from society. They were thought of as freaks and jokes abounded about them. Moreover, they had little protection and many were murdered. If books appeared about these people, the transsexual subjects were portrayed as pitiful, unhappy and marginal people whom happiness was only a dreamed-about state of being.

Things have changed quite a bit in the last ten years. Transsexuals are now in every facet of society. Many are making their crossovers at an earlier age and therefore are more glamorous than their. predecessors. The present-day transsexual is no longer hiding. They now have clubs, weekly meetings, magazines and a lot of books written about them.

My book CONTESSA was written so as to give the transsexual community a much needed lift in spirit. The main character is not to be pitied but to be enjoyed for actually having succeeded in life. I am convinced my book would make a very worthwhile motion picture. For that to happen though, people have to read CONTESSA and some producer must fall in love with the story. I invite you to get a copy and see for yourself that CONTESSA is a great human-interest story.

Be sure to visit www.jackfitzgerald.com and read about all the plays, screenplays and other books I have written.

Until our next get together,

Jack

NEW HUMOROUS SATIRE NOVEL NOW OUT AND GOING STRONG

Some time has passed since I have been here but expect me back on an more often basis now that my book VIVA LA EVOLUCION has finally hit the market. You can find it at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and order it at any bookstore. You can also find out a lot of information at my web site www.jackfitzgerald.com; however, most of all if you Google "VIVA LA EVOLUCION book" you will be amazed at how much information you'll find. Just to sum it all up, let's say that if you can't stand Ann Coulter et al, you're going to love this book. Finally there is a book out which gives them a verbal custard pie in the face. I do want you to learn more about VIVA LA EVOLUCION — and I'd even be more pleased if you read the book. It is a big brickbat to all Conservatives, born againers and greedy Free Market wonks. So, help me pass the word.

For your information, there is a very popular VIVA LA EVOLUCION tee shirt as well as coffee mugs, bumper sticker etc. out there on the internet. To learn more go to cafepress.com or Google "VIVA LA EVOLUCION".

My very best to you and help me get out the word, okay?

New Political Satire Book VIVA LA EVOLUCION Arrives in Book Stores Mid-October

About October 15th, my new book entitled VIVA LA EVOLUCION will hit the market. First though you obviously would like to know who I am.

I'm Jack Fitzgerald, a writer, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, linguist and founder of The Paris English Theatre in Paris, France. I write what I call "serious circus". By that, I believe that so much of life on the surface is comical but underneath the human condition there is always the deadly serious. The International Herald Tribune said of me, "Fitzgerald's writings are humorous but dark in tone and filled with wit that wounds, delicious irony and dialogue that skewers the vapid beliefs of everyday society.He punctures many of the hollow pretensions of the middle class and their smug prejudices, coating his words with ingenious and irreverent humor."

Now that you know something about me, you probably would like to know some information about the book. First of all, the full title is Viva La Evolución—The Truth Behind The Alexander Hayward Project.

Viva La Evolución details how dumbness in America is reaching staggering new levels daily. What is causing us to head retrograde in our cultural evolution? Are our ape cousins soon to become our siblings?

Viva La Evolución is political satire that reads like an afternon at the circus. A hilarious tale that incorporates statistics, news items and facts to describe how lack of common sense has almost become an art form in our everyday lives. The land of the free now seems to allow people to be as freely ignorant as they like.

Viva La Evolución is like an idiosyncratic reunion of George Carlin, George Bernard Shaw and Noam Chomsky. This book will certainly displease the Neo-cons but Progressives should relish it.

New Political Satire Book Deals With Stupidity in America

I'll have more to say onViva La Evolución in my future blogs, hoping to interest you into reading my book. If you have any questions or comments, I'd certainly like to hear from you.

You can learn more about my other books and plays and me at my website which is www.jackfitzgerald.com. There's an interesting story about how this website came into being which i will share in my next blog.

In the meantime, see with your ears and hear with your eyes—and you'll cut down on the number of wooden nickels you'll be offered in your daily life. Next time I will discuss what caused me to write this book. My best to you!