Life is Hellin Illinois, which is scheduled to be released January 2013, is an original work of fiction by this Blogger.
Back in 2005, I had the misfortune of finding myself on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I managed to get down there the Friday before Katrina hit. I'd gone there to be with my mother who was in the hospital. We rode out the storm together at the Biloxi Regional Medical Center. During the height of the storm I was really not sure if we'd survive. That was one of the few times in my life that I contemplated my own mortality.
I had a notebook I'd brought with me from New York, and started jotting down the events as they unfolded. I thought of the possibility that if I survived it would make a good story. When I returned to New York, I entered my notes into MicroSoft Word. There they languished for the better part of half a decade. Several times between 2010 and 2012, I had taken them out and made a not so valiant effort to coalesce them into that great american novel everyone thinks they have in them. But it just never clicked.
Over the 4 decades or so that I'd been working, first in the Navy and later in aerospace, I had occasion to travel and move a lot. Each time I encountered some stupidity, I would either post it on Facebook, or send it out in an email or both.
Sometime in 2012, I got right royal pissed off at Facebook, or rather some of the people on it, and I deleted my Facebook account. Fortunately for me, Facebook accounts never get deleted even when you delete them. But that's a rant for a different day. The problem was that once I could no longer vent my frustrations on Facebook, I had no outlet. I felt stupid sending out blurbs in emails that I found normal on Facebook. So, having all my outlets blocked, I started collecting them.
One day I started putting them into Word. At that time they were nothing but a bunch of unconnected paragraphs which insulted my Poirot like sense of order. I found myself starting to weave them into a little story. I took all the notes I'd made about my various post office experiences and made them seem as if they'd occurred during my move to southern Illinois. I did the same thing with all my experiences at different libraries and DMV offices.
When I'd used up all the experiences in my notes, I realized there was still a lot lacking. I had an urge, need actually, to somehow make all of these things feel like I was sitting around telling a story. But there were things that had happened years previously that I felt somehow had to be merged into the story in order for everything to make sense. I found myself using flashbacks to accomplish this.
Many times during my life I had tried to write a book. Each time, I got stuck at the "Create an Outline" phase. Then, not too long ago if memory serves me, in the back of a Steven King paperback, he discussed the fact that he never knew when he started writing a book how it would end. The characters dictated their own destiny. I thought that was a crock of shit, but I wasn't about to tell someone of Mr. King's stature I thought he was totally tonto.
The more I reread what I'd written, the more I felt there was something missing. I came up with the idea of a Scottish or Irish festival to help focus on some bit of information, and started looking up names of Scots and Irishmen. During my research, I came across a female Greek name which was surprisingly funny. Suddenly, I had to change the festival to Greek Fest.
Her history started taking over and before I knew it she was a second generation american to Irish parents, raised for five years by a Welch woman, and eight by two caring and loving lesbians, and finally married a Greek professor.
Suddenly I found myself creating the different threads of these peoples lives into my story.
I hope you will buy a copy and that you will enjoy it.
