In the spring of 2012, for the first
time in nearly twenty years, I didn’t have a summer musical to direct. It
seemed odd. But I had some unexpected excitement in my life when my house was
burglarized one night with me in it. Fortunately, my burglar alarm worked and
woke me up, and I had an immediate response when I called 911. The burglar was
caught before he could leave my circle.
Despite that flurry of activity, my
summer was otherwise pretty quiet. The following spring I felt a little
restless, once again having no show to direct. A friend suggested I write a
book, and after some hesitation, I dove in. I’d always wanted to write a book.
I had the time. Why not give it a try? Several months and many thousands of
words later, I’d completed How I Grew Up.
I wanted to see it in print before I died, so I found a Print On Demand company
to publish it. Holding it in my hands was immensely satisfying.
One character in the book had a
subplot which easily expanded to another novel, so I embarked on Eli’s Heart. More months passed with many more
thousand words, and now I had two novels in print. I’d discovered a new passion.
I’d also discovered Amazon’s CreateSpace which afforded me the opportunity to
truly self-publish at almost no expense, since I had decent computer skills and
could format the book myself. Amazing.
Now I was on a roll, and You Are My Song followed within about
nine months. Another character from How I
Grew Up insisted I tell his story, so I did. And just like that, without my
ever planning it, I now have a trilogy on my hands. The books can be read
separately, but to make it a true trilogy I knew it would be good to go back to
How I Grew Up and make a few
revisions to tie the three stories more strongly together.
So back to my first novel; formatting
the manuscript to match the dimensions of the second and third books, and then
re-reading How I Grew Up as I
corrected mistakes I knew were there and made the revisions I had planned.
It’s a compelling story. Melanie
Stewart is an eighteen-year-old high school senior whose parents are shot to
death by her estranged brother-in-law only days before she plans to audition
for her school’s musical, Carousel. While the book is fiction, this actually happened to a close friend of mine in Oak Ridge (Tennessee) High
School. How she won the leading role and coped with the horrific tragedy she
and her sisters suffered is the story I tell. Her courage and remarkable
performance as Julie Jordan had an impact on me all my life – an impact much
greater than I understood at the time.
It’s also a pretty darned good book,
if I say so myself. I enjoyed reading it again. I wrote it in the first person
and tried to recall as much about the real-life Melanie, Anita Barker, as I
could. Sadly, she died in I believe 1992 of breast cancer. I have a beautiful
photo of Anita, a head shot she had taken in Los Angeles after she went west to
try to become a movie star. It sat on my computer as I wrote. It helped me
remember how she talked, how she thought (she was very much a dreamer), how she
dressed, how she moved. She was a very talented girl.
I didn’t release the book as YA
literature. No vampires or otherworldly beings, no magic. But people who read
it comment on how inspirational it is, and what a great role model “Melanie”
is. So with the re-release – which I expect will happen around November 1 – I will
probably make it Young Adult as well as General Fiction.
Much of the book is about the
preparation for the production of Carousel,
because it’s what kept Anita (and her counterpart Melanie) strong through an
awful time in her life. And when I wrote the book, I had just directed a group
of twenty-first century teenagers in the show. That seemed a little daunting,
but the kids came to love Carousel as
much as I did and they put on one heck of a show. They were splendid.
Spending time with them reminded me
of my own high school experiences and how immersed in the musical people who
are part of the show become. Not just the cast. The tech kids as well; the kids
in the orchestra; the stage crew. The show belongs to all of them. Here’s one
of my favorite parts of the book, where I write about the experience of waiting
for the call to “places” on opening night:
There is no feeling like those few minutes
before the first performance begins. I looked around the room and thought how
much I loved and appreciated every single person there. And I think everybody
felt that way. We had worked so hard, we had done this together, and now we
were going to give an audience something that had come to belong to us, to all
of us, to each of us. It was a gift we had given ourselves, and now we wanted
to give it to them and share all the joy, all the sadness, all the emotion and
life of this beautiful show. There had been other productions of Carousel,
and there would be many more in years to come, but none would ever be exactly
the same as this one.
We were creating memories that
would be with us forever.
