Wednesday, December 3, 2008




Some good news, after a long summer aand fall of not-good things. Go to this link:






and you'll find Miss McGhee at #8 on the Barnes and Noble bestseller list for gay/lesbian/fiction/romance/ something else. The subcategories are several but meaningless to me. I can honestly claim that I have a book in someone's top ten best sellers, at least for today.


It makes me feel great. Better than I have felt for a long time. Personal, family losses that I won't go into here have made struggling with the rewrites for What's Best for Jane a real trial. Just lately, that dam seems to have been breached and so the work is going forward.
And hey, we have a new president. So we'll soon be done with George W. Bush.


Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Odds and Ends, Dots and Dashes


I just read Cavedweller and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, both excellent books that I missed when they were bestsellers. Why am I reading? Because I just sent in the ms of What's Best for Jane, and I am languishing in the desert, that barren, desperate place, waiting to hear from my editor.


The GCLS conference is this weekend in Phoenix, and I can't attend, for financial reasons. I really, really wanted to, because Miss McGhee is a finalist for an award. I shall make it a policy to always show up whenever anyone wants to give me an award, but my bank account just did not cooperate this time. If by some miracle, my book should win, I will post an acceptance speech of the highest order here.


While waiting for the editing process to begin on Jane, I have been thinking about the next project. A few people have suggested that I write a memoir, the story of my childhood, growing up in a large family in south Alabama. I have given it some thought, to the extent that a 150,000 word draft sits waiting to be dusted off and revamped. I think that the only way I could do this is to distance myself from it, to create a fictional version of myself, thus gaining leeway to make me so much more interesting than I am, and also insulating those friends and family who might not be pleased to find my cockeyed perceptions of them in print.
It would be like looking at a picture within a picture within a picture. Stretching the truth into an unrecognizable shape, creating a behemoth from a gnat. Lying through my teeth. I am beginning to like this idea.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Saints and Sinners literary conference


I'll be attending the Saints and Sinners literary conference in New Orleans May 8-11. This is an extraordinary gathering of GLBT authors, editors, and publishers. The conference serves as a fundraiser for NOAIDS.


This year Bywater Books, my publisher, will have a strong showing at the conference, with six or seven authors. Last year's winner of the Bywater Prize for fiction, Jill Malone, will be there, promoting the release of her debut novel, Red Audrey and the Roping. The 2008 prize winners will be announced at the closing reception.


The schedule is still be firmed up and completed, but I'll be doing a reading, and maybe sitting on a panel. Here's the bio from the program:



Bett Norris graduated from the University of Alabama with a BA in history and a burning desire to write, having grown up just down the road a piece from Harper Lee. She drew heavily on her Alabama roots for her first novel, Miss McGhee, a runnerup for Bywater Books prize for fiction, set during the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. She dutifully set her second novel, What's Best for Jane, in the South as well, certain that the well of rich material to be found there will never run dry.
I'm in the process of selecting an exerpt from What's Best for Jane to read. This is harder than you might think. First, I have to read the section aloud and time myself. Accounting for reading much too fast, the reading should be no more than ten minutes. Nest, choosing a piece that needs very little setup or explanation. Then, practice. None of this really helps my nervousness.
Scheduled speakers and panelists this year in clude Val McDermid, Dorothy Allison, Cynn Chadwick, Jewelle Gomez, Jim Grimsley, and many others.
Centered in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in the heart of the French Quarter, this thing is always a lot of fun. Yes, I learn a lot from the workshops. But it is New Orleans, you know.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Welcome










Everybody has a blog, right? So here goes. I'll try to answer questions that any of you may have, try to keep it interesting, if not always amusing.

There's so much I could talk about. The election campaign season is upon us here in America, and it should be an exciting time, with two viable candidates for the Democratic party's nomination for president, the likes of which we've never seen. Frankly, like most of the country, I am tired of the news coverage of the primary marathon.
I'd rather talk about writing. One of the most frequently asked questions of any writer is "where do you get your ideas?" Like most writers, I steal them. Just kidding, mostly. The answer is complicated. The idea for my first published novel, Miss McGhee, came from a character in another novel I wrote, the soon-to-be-released What's Best for Jane. So where did the idea for Jane come from? A dream. An image. And one fragment, a phrase, that kept repeating in my head.

Some books are driven by plot and action. My novels are character-driven. I think about a situation, sure, that I'd like to have a character address, an issue maybe. But usually it's all about a particular character, which I then put in a particular place and time.

Let's use Miss McGhee as our example. I had this woman in mind, and I put her in a particular era in American history, when there were rough and scary times, terrible and wonderful things happening in the country. The decades of the 1950's and 1960's then dictated some of the plot. The particular setting, Alabama during those decades, also demanded certain impacts on the plot.

I knew my character right down to the bones. I've often said that I know Mary McGhee so well, knew so deeply what I wanted her to say, that I could have put her in any situation, any time and place, and told the story I wanted to tell about her, simply because I knew her. I could make her a NASA scientist, an attorney, a school teacher, a wife and mother, a cop, a cab driver in New York, an insurance adjuster in California, a deep sea diver. For me, as a writer, it is all about knowing the character and knowing what I want to say about that character.

Some who have read this novel say that is is a romance, a love story. Some call it historical fiction. For me, it was simply about a woman coming to terms with herself.