After my seventh book, LIKE A SISTER, came out, I decided to test myself beyond the limits of the one-hundred page precious novel. It was time too to quit cheating on research. So, I dug in on STATEN BAY, a lengthy historical, generational saga set in the late 1800s. My protagonist, Doll, was easy; she is loosely based on my great grandmother, a tough, beautiful mama-girl whose mission it was to gain her independence when she left home; to tame her husband, a wealthy, cocky, eternal bachelor-type; and in the process acclimate herself to life on the wild, working plantation of Staten Bay.
Done with that novel, with no break in between, I set my sights on writing another novel of the same period, MASSACRE AT MONIAC CROSSING, while I still remembered from my previous research not to slam screen doors in 1900 because there were none. MASSACRE had long been burning in my brain. Friends kept sending copies of a 1977 newspaper piece about a bloody uprising one Sunday autumn evening in 1904, in a Georgia/Florida line turpentine camp where their “plowshares were beaten into swords, so to speak.” It took a while, however, for me to get a toehold. I couldn’t start till I was moved to write. My inspiration came one night while watching the popular singer, “Jewel,” singing the National Anthem at a rodeo on TV. Learning about her humble background and her aversion to being labeled a “diva” further inspired me. A character based on Jewel, Merry Gay Rose, could carry me where I wanted to go: on a train excursion to St. Augustine, Florida, for a community picnic, at the invitation and command of the evil and inventive, Nathan Shirley, then back again to Moniac Crossing and a racial/class uprising that changed “daytime friends into nighttime enemies.” Folks around North Florida and South Georgia are still trying to get the straight of what happened. So, playing God, my fictional newspaperman, Claude, tells them the bitter truth, even knowing they prefer their history a bit sweet.
About my story collection: published stories and new were piling up. Literally. At first I had 30 some-odd stories in that pile. Then my agent, Joelle Delbourgo, made me go through and select the best—the ones that worked with my theme of something safe and something free. Thus, my collection titled SOMETHING SAFE, SOMETHING FREE. My characters, in both my novels and my stories, are always seeking the safe and the free, which oftentimes means hitting rock-bottom and having to work their way up. Safety and freedom for them is found in meeting head-on unavoidable social ruin, financial defeat, and/or physical and emotional doom. The strongest take to the hardroad with nothing more to loose, nothing more to fear, because they’ve been broken and they’ve survived. Life begins from there.