Apr 13 2009
Gone With the Wind, Part Deux: Melanie’s Vengeance
Since I have accepted my identity as a glorious failure as a writer, perhaps it’s about time I’ve pursued writing ideas to go with that identity. And one idea that has captivated me for YEARS has been the idea for a sequel to one of my favorite novels, Gone With the Wind.
Now, there has already been an excellent sequel to Gone With the Wind, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley. In addition, there has been a not-too-bad sequel called Rhett Butler’s People, and a sucky-horrible novella called ‘The Wind Done Gone’ by Alice Randall, who evidently played the race card to get this third-rate piece of govno published. Hint to Alice: the next time you decide to write some crappy fan fiction and inflict it on the public, pick something you’re actually a fan of.
My concept of a Gone With the Wind sequel is a bit different from the previous. For one thing it’s set in outer space two hundred years in the future. For another, as our story begins, Scarlett O’Hara is dead and Melanie isn’t. You see, the whole last bit of Gone With the Wind, from Scarlett’s miscarriage on, is actually a hallucination Scarlett is having as she’s dying.
Other bits of the story: Melanie wants revenge on Ashley because he’s a lousy husband, she kind of has a crush on Rhett, and Prissy, the slave girl who doesn’t know anything about birthin’ no babies, is a lawyer. (In this futuristic Old South, slaves are educated and can run for office. Common whites (poor white trash, non-slaveowners) complain about how the slaveowners would rather vote a slave into office than a common white.)
In order to write this weird epic, I will have to mentally transpose the whole story of Gone With the Wind into the futuristic setting before I can write the actual story at hand, create new names for all the characters, and so on.
The question of course that comes to mind is if this story, if I were to manage to write it, could be published. The court case involving Alice Randall’s GWTW micro-epic would indicate that in spite of the rights of the Margaret Mitchell estate, a GWTW parody/sequel could be published. And my ideas are a great deal farther out from Margaret Mitchell’s copyrighted work than Alice’s.
As I write about this, I’m filled with the desire to get this blog entry done and actually begin work on the novel. This eagerness is something I haven’t felt for a while. I do believe I’m actually going to do it. (Scary, isn’t it?)
Another writing idea that was inspired by my last blog entry was to resume work on my old lesbian romance novel. Now, the problem is that when I wrote it I was a Neopagan Marxist and now I’m a Catholic Conservative. (I’m still Gay, though. And chaste. But I was chaste back then, too, though then it was because of unattractiveness and autism rather than because of religious convictions.)
So now I’m filled with the desire to write a lesbian romance novel that is also a work of Christian (Catholic) fiction. Who knows, perhaps I’ll start a whole new genre— the sexy/chaste Catholic lesbian romance genre.
Now— my challenge to my reader(s): what weird and possibly unpublishable novel ideas are YOU playing around with? Remember: anyone can fail at being a writer. You’ve got to take some risks if you want to be a GLORIOUS failure.
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Sheep news: yesterday one of my Shetland sheep, Rue, had twin ewe lambs. This is the first set of twin lambs of the year. There were 4 single ram lambs born before, and one more single ram lamb this morning. I need to explain to the girls that sheep are supposed to have twins!
The firstborn twin I named Katarzyna, it’s a Polish name and I’m on a Polish language and culture kick, plus I read a blog by someone called Katarzyna. I played around with other names for the other twin, even considered ‘Klom’ (a planet mentioned on Doctor Who). Finally I settled on ‘Sana’, the main character in a manga/anime series I like called Kodocha. After I named Sana, I remembered that I’d named a ram lamb Rei after a character in Kodocha last year. (Rei’s twin is Rhys, named after Gwen’s boyfriend in Torchwood.)
