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!

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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.