Channeling Scarlett?

On Monday evening Nita and I shared a celebratory bottle of champagne as we stared at the completed manuscript of Redeeming Honor. It is still a draft which will be edited, but every chapter is written. I don’t know if I’m getting better as a novelist, but I’m getting faster. I wrote this third book in just nine months, compared to sixteen months for the second one, and about four years to write my first novel.

Regardless of the number of months spent at the keyboard, I still get a warm feeling of accomplishment when I finish. Holding and looking at the first paperback proof copy of a new McBride novel is even better than standing across the street, looking at my freshly mowed lawn on a hot summer day, drenched in sweat and enjoying a cold one.

Last night, while Nita was gone to her ladies’ book club gathering, I watched a film made in 1989, about filming Gone With the Wind, which premiered in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939.  I have mixed feelings about GWTW, the novel and the epic movie.

First, I read 90% of the book while I was in high school, but quit when I finally had had enough of Scarlett’s self-absorbed bitchiness. Second, when the film was re-released in 1966 and played at the Arlene Theater in Longview, Texas, where I grew up, I went to see it. It was my first date with the cute girl who sat at my table in our high school art class. Her name was Cheryl and we never had a second date, probably because I fell asleep during the movie and my lolling head drooled on her shoulder before she elbowed me awake. It’s cute when six-month-old grandson Jackson drools, wasn’t so much when seventeen-year-old Phil did.

Later, in 1999, I worked a few days as a movie extra in my Confederate soldier reenacting duds for a new movie being filmed in central Texas, American Outlaws. It’s not GWTW, but it is a fun, entertaining movie. No Scarlett. Anyway, I heard the man who was handing out stock Confederate uniforms from the big costume trailer tell another worker that these uniforms hadn’t been out of the warehouse in Hollywood since they were cleaned after the filming of Gone With the Wind.  I don’t know if he was joking or not, but the two long racks held dozens and dozens of Confederate uniforms, each hanging in their own plastic bag and each one was artfully “ragged” in appearance. My mind immediately went back to my unfortunate date with Cheryl, and the one movie scene I was awake to see and remember: The heartrending panoramic view of the hundreds and hundreds of dead and wounded Confederate soldiers laid out in rows in Atlanta. It was easy to imagine that some of those extras wore these same costumes sixty years before.

That's not a movie poster of American Outlaws, but is a frame from the movie of a real actor wearing one of the possible GWTW costumes, with me wearing my own Rebel suit right behind him. Son Ben was working at the local movie theater here in Lockhart when American Outlaws came out, and the movie owner clipped a couple of frames from the copy of the film he received and made a gift of them.  Nice guy. 

With that background regarding GWTW, I’ve worried for two years that my Faith Samuelson character channels Scarlett O’Hara. That bothers me because I’ve intended the McBee novels to more in the vein of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series, not GWTW, and while I appreciate Scarlett’s gritty survival instincts, I didn’t like her.

By the end of the first McBee book I wasn’t too sure where Faith stood on my mental “Scarlett-meter.” By the end of Redeeming Honor, and after seeing the documentary about GWTW last night, I’m feeling better that I haven’t created a copycat Scarlett. I’ve decided they merely share a few of the attractive personality traits exhibited by magnetic young women. Never mind that both books are set in the south during the Civil War and both women have “men issues.” Never mind that GWTW was a phenomenal best seller and my books are barely selling.

Now, in the third of the McBee series, I need to make sure Faith doesn’t drift into Scarlett-like bad girl selfishness, while she copes with similar end-of-the-war survival needs that Scarlett faced in GWTW.

And if you have read this far and concluded Phil’s being pretty uppity to compare his writing and characters to Gone With the Wind, you’re right. The world won’t be going gaga over McBride’s Civil War novels like people were over GWTW in the 1930’s. But my grandchildren will be able to pick up a stack of tattered paperbacks someday and say, “Damn, granddaddy wrote these. I wonder if they’re any good?” They might even read one or two of them. And if they do, they’re going to like Faith.