I’m Thinking This is a Good Thing?

I had an interesting incident late last week that I think says something about my evolution as a writer over the past twenty years? What it says I’m not sure about, though . . .

I was revising a scene from one character’s point-of-view (Steven Burr’s) to another character’s point-of-view (Melissa Benedict’s). I was writing dialogue between these two characters and trying to stitch a new conversation into the original conversation I had written years ago. The original scene was written with a light, almost ironic touch–Steven is talking to Melissa after they leave a restaurant and are walking back to the lobby of the hotel she’s staying at. She’s a little drunk–not falling-down drunk, just really tipsy. (If a verse from a certain Carrie Underwood song named “Before He Cheats” comes to mind but written from the point of view of the guy–yeah, you’re thinking in the right direction.)

So I’m rewriting this scene into the point of view of Melissa. Her judgement’s impaired, and she knows it. But this guy is being really, really patient with her–he’s walking slowly and making sure she doesn’t trip and fall in the parking lot of the hotel. And I am trying to figure out some way to break the tension here–because the conversation I have already written is too good to lose, but I need to find a way to get her to that conversation, written in this light, meet-cute tone.

I finally reach the end of my dedicated writing time and just give up and decide to tackle it again the next night–so I shut down my computer to start winding down the night. I’m talking on Facebook Messenger to one of my book friends an hour later–and the solution presents itself while I’m explaining it to her. I sign in to the notes app on my phone, type in this solution, and soon after that pack things in for the night. I wrote the new bit into the scene the next time I sat down to work on my book.

But I remembered an incident from writing my very first book, Hurricane Baby, years ago–I ran into a similar situation where I just could not solve the plot problem in front of me in the text. I employed a similar approach to just stop writing and think on the situation. But that time–it took THREE DAYS to come up with an answer. And even then, I knew it wasn’t a very good answer and revised the whole conversation over again in my 2022 rewrite of that book.

I guess the moral is to just trust the process? And as a writer, I know now that if I continue working on this story, I may go back and revise that whole scene all over again. Like I said, I thought the contrast of time elapsed between problem and solution was instructive–though I’m not sure how. Any comments on your own process are welcome!

Happy writing!

(By the way–whoever has spent all day reading these posts, WELCOME!)

Goals

Day after tomorrow, I’m going to speak to the first of three Rotary Clubs that have invited me to present a talk involving my journey with Hurricane Baby: Stories. If you aren’t familiar with Rotary Clubs, they tend to be members of the business community that have come together to do service projects for their town, county, etc. These particular clubs meet once a week. I’m doing one on May 5, another on May 21, and another on June 11.

I’ve decided to give my talk on the process I used to set and achieve my goals for Hurricane Baby. I’m going to open with a question: I’m not asking for a show of hands–but have any of you ever had a dream/vision/goal for your life that was ridiculous? Something where you wanted to do it but talked yourself out of it–because it was ridiculous, frivolous, or impossible?

Then I’m going to go through my goal-setting process.

SET A VISION! Decide what you want to do. You can have several visions over the course of your life. As you achieve one, find another.

STUDY UP! Learn everything you can about what it will take to achieve your vision.

SET MINI-GOALS! Break down the process into parts–and while doing those parts, only focus on those parts.

SET A PLAN! What are you going to do to meet those goals?

PLAN TO SUCCEED! Know what to do as you go.

PLAN TO FAIL! What will you do if you don’t succeed?

EXECUTE! Carry out the plan you’ve set to accomplish the first mini-goal, then the next, then the next.

FOCUS! on your plan and your goal every day. Always be working!

HAVE GRACE! Handle frustrations. If the plan isn’t working, change the plan to one that does work.

WHEN YOU SUCCEED, CELEBRATE! Celebrate each mini-goal as you complete it and then celebrate when the total dream comes true!

Then I’m going to read the first few pages of Hurricane Baby, then do Q&A if there’s any time left. I’ll have my books there to buy and sign if anybody wants one.

Pray for me doing this. I am not quite a bundle of nerves about it, but I can use all the encouragement I can get. Thanks!

Checklist Time

I am composing a list of revisions that need to be made in my manuscript, now titled Our Little Secret. Action items range from rewriting entire sections to a new point-of-view to perusing the menu of a local seafood restaurant and seeing what dishes the characters would order on their visit there. That list is what I plan to accomplish during the next month.

Committing it to paper is one way I make sure each item gets accomplished. I can check them off as completed. If needed, I can add new action items to the list.

I am a list-maker by nature. Helps me keep organized.

Wish me luck!

What Happens When You Try to Force Things to Happen

Back last year in the wake of getting a contract for Looking for Home (that was sadly cancelled), I decided to go ahead and start on Book #3. I wanted to revise another old manuscript, so I pulled it out and reread it.

While reading, I realized it was such a fundamentally different kind of book than Hurricane Baby and Looking for Home. Southern, yes, but only Southern because it was set in Mississippi. The theme of the book was very different from the other two; it was a very contemporary story as well. No deep, dark, past secrets to explore, etc.

So I wondered if I needed to work to make it more Southern, more gothic, and more spooky. I decided I did. I went to work on the POV, the setting, the chain of events. I introduced a supernatural aspect to the book; I changed the fundamental theme; I changed the struggles of the characters drastically.

And a voice in the back of my mind kept telling me that it wasn’t going to work this way.

But I ignored it. For months.

I probably wrote fifty pages of new material. I started a new document in my computer called RANT just to dump all the angst I was having doing this work–talking about what I wanted to do but talking about how much trouble I was having doing it, too. I thought I was just suffering from writers’ block again.

After not fooling with it for the past three months while I wondered what I was going to do with my creative life and after taking the initiative to cut about two-thirds of the material, I now realize I was just trying to force a new vision on a book out of fear. I had wondered if I built a fanbase on historical fiction if I could pull off a move to something more contemporary. Wondered if what I had tried to do then would work for the market now.

I finally realized I was just trying to make the story something it wasn’t.

Each story is its own creation. I was not the same writer I was back in the late 2000s, but that didn’t mean that every book I wrote had to do what I had done in revising Hurricane Baby, either. I was allowed to write whatever I wanted to write. And if I wanted to still do a story exploring those themes that were issues in the 2000s, that was fine. Did that mean I could do it differently to account for changes in society? Yes. But it did not mean I needed to chase a “brand” at this stage of my writing life.

If the story wants to be something different than what you normally write, let it. That’s how you grow as a writer. Challenging yourself to do something you haven’t done before.

Book #3 (which I’m currently calling Our Little Secret as a working title) is going to be different from the other two. And now that I’ve accepted that, I feel excited to work on it again. Don’t write scared. That’s the takeway.

Happy writing!

Some Surprises!

Earlier this week, I spent a few days in Starkville, Mississippi, home to Mississippi State University.

Home.

I grew up in Fentress, Mississippi, thirty minutes away from Starkville, down Mississippi Highway 12. I graduated with my B. A. and M. A. from there in the early ’90s.

Never did I ever dream that one day, a book I wrote would be required reading in a class offered by that university. Never did I ever think a book of mine would greet visitors to the English Department by being in a display next to the likes of Brad Watson, God rest his soul. (see photo–credit to Daughter #3 for that picture).

I did a lot of dreaming when I was a student there–but I never went that far in my mind.

I read my work to an audience while I was there that was so appreciative and seemed so interested in what I had to say about writing and the writing life. It was all I could do not to pinch myself standing in front of them.

(You can see the video of the event if you go to the Hurricane Baby: Stories page and click on “Press”)

And I sold and signed some books at that event as well. So lovely to be able to do that.

Then this weekend, I went to a small town new to me–Picayune, Mississippi. They had a street fair downtown; one of the booth organizers had reached out on social media for Mississippi authors, and I volunteered to go. Spent this afternoon talking to folks and selling my dark little story collection. I didn’t really know what to expect as far as sales there–I’d never done an outdoor venue like that before.

And I sold half the books I took–about as many books than I’d actually sold at the university event.

Readers are everywhere, y’all. Make hay while the sun shines.

Query Round-Up

So I realized I haven’t listed out my query statistics for Looking For Home for a while, so here we go:

Total presses queried: 39

Rejections (including those last year): 17

Queries/manuscripts outstanding: 22

Presses left on list: 13

So about normal, I guess? I am still occasionally searching to see if other presses I don’t currently know about are opening up to submissions. When I’m done, it will have gone out to 50+ outlets. So still lots of time for something to happen.

Lots to Celebrate with Lots of Links!

So today represents the first fiction I’ve placed since I published Hurricane Baby–this work is a storyline I first created in 2009 as part of a novel about a week of loss in the small community of Rock Star, Mississippi. Much later on, I took one of those stories told in the book and turned it into a short story of the day Glenn Crawford buried his wife, Gina, who died of breast cancer at 33, leaving him with two young children. That story, “This Side of Heaven“, published today in Salvation South, a magazine committed to telling the multiplicity of stories that feature the mind and sensibility of the modern southeastern United States. Thanks so much to Chuck Reese for taking this story and putting it out to the world.

Also this weekend, my alma mater, Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi, put out a news release about my upcoming appearance there. You can see the whole story here: From the Eye of the Storm: New accounts of Katrina shared at MSU Price Caldwell Lecture | Mississippi State University.

But this is my favorite paragraph: “I admire the way Whitehead brings her characters to life so vividly and makes us care about them. This collection is a literary page turner that my students and I have enjoyed reading and discussing,” said Becky Hagenston, MSU English professor and director of the department’s creative writing emphasis. Hearing this about the student reaction makes me really look forward to the classroom Q&A I’m scheduled for.

I also got word about what sounds like a cool event in Picayune, Mississippi, the Picayune Semi-Annual Spring Street Festival: Events. I am partnering with Tracy Ledford and other authors to man a bookish tent at the event where I can sell and sign books from 1-3 p.m. on Sunday, April 12. Picayune is about as far southwest you can go and still be in Mississippi. I’m really looking forward to visiting and seeing what all they have going on in their creative communities.

Whew. That’s a lot going on. I really never thought I’d still be promoting my book six months after the one-year anniversary of its publication. But it’s a lovely surprise to be doing so.

Stripping the Work Down to Basics

So I have actually been thinking about Book #3 quite a bit lately. (I know. I know. I said I wouldn’t work on anything until Looking for Home sold. I also reserved the right to change my mind.)

On Friday night while I was out of town, I remembered one of the guiding principles I used when revising Hurricane Baby–cut all the boring parts! For this rough draft, I figured out that meant to cut every part of the book where the two main characters weren’t directly interacting with each other.

Well.

I set to doing that this afternoon after we got back from the conference.

And that process cut the manuscript from 321 pages to 115.

Yikes.

While doing it, I realized that much of what I was cutting was extremely wordy setup for the next interactions between these two main characters. I was using a lot of words/dialogue/description/character thoughts to explain everything that was happening behind the scenes–then summarizing all that action in the next encounter between these two main characters.

So. What’s next?

I’m going to let it sit for a week or so–until April 1. Then I’m going to go back and re-read the stripped-down version, looking for what may need to be done to further develop their relationship. Because their relationship is where the heat is, the smoke. The action.

So we will see what happens.

Nervous!

This weekend, I go to the Mississippi Philogical Association meeting in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I will be reading the first story from Looking for Home in public for the first time ever.

I remember the weekend at the end of February 2023 when I went to the MPA event in Columbus, MS, to read the first story in Hurricane Baby. I was so scared reading this one out loud for the first time, too. My hands were shaking as I held the pages and read them. I read too fast because of the nerves and the fear that I would take up too much time.

It went live for pre-sales that weekend. too–I got the email that night while I was answering messages after the last event. I remember sitting there in the hotel room, at turns both giddy and terrified that my book was really out in the world after so many years of wishing and striving and writing.

When I submitted this excerpt to MPA, I had hoped that the event would be the launch for Looking for Home to be out in the world, too. But alas. Hopefully it will make an impression on those listening at the session. I have another writer reading their work after me, and I’m looking forward to meeting them. And to seeing so many friendly faces of people I’ve gotten to meet over the past few years while traveling for Hurricane Baby.

And Monday I get to have my conference with Chuck Reese at Salvation South about my short story they are interested in. Onward and upward! Wish me well!

More Encouragement

Late last week I got an email from Chuck Reece at Salvation South–he opened with, “No one should have to wait eleven months to hear from a submission.”

I didn’t even remember sending him anything. After some checking, I realized the submission had been sent in April 2025, probably just after they ran a story from my very good friend Ellen Ann Fentress about Dusti Bonge’s second-act reinvention in mid-century Mississippi.

Even though it took eleven months, I was gratified by the fourth sentence where he wrote they liked my story “This Side of Heaven” and wanted to publish it with some trimming being done.

I’m cool with that.

So the first step in that process is a video conference with Chuck, probably this Thursday. (He had to catch his breath from being at the week-long AWP Conference and Bookfair in Baltimore. I could understand that.)

Otherwise, this month I go to William Carey University in Hattiesburg for the Mississippi Philogical Association meeting on March 20-21 where I’m going to read from Looking For Home at a creative writing panel late Friday afternoon. Then on April 6, I head up to Mississippi State University for the Caldwell Reading Series event that I have been looking forward to ever since I got the word that Hurricane Baby had been accepted for publication.

And that’s the last book event I’m scheduled to appear at for 2026. I plan to go to other events, like Possumtown Book Fest in August and Mississippi Book Festival in September. I have a couple of submissions out for other events but not any real expectations to be accepted.

I am doing some thinking about what comes next. I’m still sending out Looking for Home to small presses; the last one on my list is Four Way Books, which opens for submissions on November 1. I’m still thinking I won’t go back into a book project until I have a contract for Looking for Home. But I may change my mind again, too. That’ll be fine, too. Maybe I’ll write more short stories. Maybe I’ll get back into poetry. I also saw a call-for-papers for creative nonfiction, research, or academic work about revisiting childhood favorite books. I’m slowly drafting an abstract for a paper for that project.

Thinking counts as writing. Don’t forget that. Happy March, y’all.