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.