I’ve always found it kind of neat that I was born on Margaret Mitchell’s birthday, November the 8th. Gave me an interesting connection to the writer I so admired from the first time I read Gone With the Wind as a young teen. Don’t remember the year, but do remember how I loved living in the world she created – and how I hated the ending she gave me! No romance with Ashley, whom I adored (so much more interesting in the book than in the movie, sorry Leslie Howard)! Just a shocking, “I don’t give a damn,” from Rhett at the end of those 1200 captivating pages.

Of course, I wanted to fix that awful ending, and imagined how the book should have gone. Being a born writer (well, as long as I can remember, anyhow), it didn’t seem like too much of a task to me. Just pick up the story where Margaret left off, following Rhett down the street to his own adventures before meeting up again with Scarlett. This was before the copycat novels Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s People tried to do the same thing, and my version was sooooo much better! Rhett would return to New Orleans (not Charleston, as in those other books), where his secret son with Belle Watling has been living in a fancy boarding school. That was Belle’s idea, not wanting her son to know who his mother really was, and Rhett went along with her plan, not sure how to tell the fine Butler family that there is an heir born of a prostitute…

Hmm. Seems like a theme that appears elsewhere in my writing. Maybe I get that nobleman-in-disguise storyline from another childhood favorite of mine, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain himself shows up in several places in my The Saga of Doc Holliday). Fiction is derivative, after all, as a writer can only write what she’s lived or read or otherwise imagined.Continue reading