Jackie Warren Tatum's Blog

Schedule of Upcoming Author Events for Jackie Warren Tatum, Author of Unspeakable Things a novel. Signed copies of Unspeakable Things a novel will always be available for purchase at author events and all author events will be open to the public unless otherwise noted. 

Friday and Saturday, August 25, 26, 2017, Mississippi Writers Guild Bookstore, Mississippi Writers Guild Conference, Friday 6 p.m. < ;  Saturday from 8 a.m. – 6 p.m., Holiday Inn Trustmark, 110 Bass Pro Drive, Pearl, MS 39208. 

Saturday, September 16, 10 a.m. – noon, Meet The Author/Book Signing, Meridian-Lauderdale County Public Library, 2517 7th Street, Meridian, MS 39301. 

Sunday, September 17, 1-4 p.m., Meet The Author/Book Signing, Barnes & Noble at Barnes Crossing, 1001 Barnes Crossing Road #104, Tupelo, MS 38804.

Tuesday, September 19, noon, Speaking/Book Signing, Lunching With Books, Amory Municipal Library, 401 Second Avenue North, Amory, MS 38821. 

Tuesday, September 26, beginning at 11:30 a.m., Speaking/Book Signing, Friends of Winona-Montgomery County Fall Program, Winona-Montgomery County Library, 115 N. Quitman St., Winona, MS 38967.

Thursday, October 5, 1:30 p.m., Speaking/Book Signing, Friends of the Library, Magee Library, 120 North West First Street, Magee, MS 39111. 

Monday, October 23, 2017, 5:30-7:30, FREE Workshop: You Wrote It! What Do You Do With It? Subtitle: Marketing Your First Indy Author Book, Lorelei Books, 1103 Washington Street, Vicksburg, MS 39183. You may pre-register for this Free Workshop by calling Kelle or Haley, Lorelei Books, 601.634.8624. 

Saturday, October 28, 9:00 a.m. to 10 a.m., Crazy Day in Magee Book Signing in the Magee Library, 120 North West First Street, Magee, MS 39111. 

Thursday, November 9, beginning at 5:30 p.m. >, Signing in Turnrow Books during Greenwood Downtown Holiday Open House, 304 Howard Street, Greenwood, MS 38930. 

Saturday, November 11, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Signing in Pentimento Books during the 10th Annual Holiday Market in Olde Towne Clinton, 302 Jefferson Street, Clinton, MS 39503.

Saturday, January 27, 2018, 11 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Speaker for Gulf Coast Writers Association Meeting and Book Signing, Gulfport Galleria downstairs, 1300 24th Avenue, Gulfport, MS 39501. 

Yes, you can order your soft back copy of Unspeakable Things a novel from your easy chair AND at a 10% discount off the Amazon price. 

Just click on the link below for orders to be delivered directly to you.

https://secure.myBookOrders.com/order/jackie-warren-tatum

Thank you for your order.  The author Jackie Warren Tatum would greatly appreciate any reviews of the novel, even just a few lines on a comment here, or on Amazon.com, or on Goodreads. She appreciates your readership.

The release of Jackie Warren Tatum’s Unspeakable Things a novel will occur December 7, 2016, with a party and book signing at Lemuria Books, Banner Hall, Jackson, MS from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.

You are invited to attend. Refreshments will be served.

If you are not in the Jackson, MS area, click on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com to purchase Jackie Warren Tatum’s Unspeakable Things a novel in soft back. The ebook of the novel will be available on line soon.

To enjoy details about this debut work of fiction, please click on the link below.

press-releasetatumrevised2

In order to automatically receive Jackie Warren Tatum’s future posts, including additions to her Schedule of Upcoming Author Events, please click on the blue “follow” button on the lower right of the screen. Thanks.

Release of Unspeakable Things a novel

The release of Jackie Warren Tatum’s Unspeakable Things a novel will occur December 7, 2016, with a party and book signing at Lemuria Books, Banner Hall, Jackson, MS from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.

You are invited to attend. Refreshments will be served.

If you are not in the Jackson, MS area, click on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com to purchase Jackie Warren Tatum’s Unspeakable Things a novel in soft back. The ebook of the novel will be available on line soon.

To enjoy details about this debut work of fiction, please click on the link below.

press-releasetatumrevised2

In order to automatically receive Jackie Warren Tatum’s future posts, including those identifying the locations and times of upcoming book reading and/or signing events, please click on the blue “follow” button on the lower right of the screen. Thanks.

Thanks to James Patterson Photography, Jackson, MS, for this portrait which will appear on the back cover of Unspeakable Things: A Novel to be released later this year.

I just stood there. Looking at her. Something about the way the light hit her front piqued my interest.

“You know you want to pick me up,” she said. “Go ahead. Touch me. Lay your hands on me.”

But there were so many others around. I wasn’t sure if she was worth my time. I walked away and left her. Moved out among the stacks. Sniffed my way around.

But she had enticed me. I kept wondering what might be inside her. So, I went back.

“Go ahead. Take a chance. Turn me over,” she persisted.

I did. There, on her back, I saw more of what she’d been trying to show me. More of what I needed to know.

I put my hands on her. I picked her up. I took her home with me.

Now, I cannot leave her alone. I cannot take my eyes off her. I simply cannot.

*****

This could be a dialogue between you, a prospective reader, and whatever turns out to be the cover that we are presently creating for Unspeakable Things: A Novel.

Hopefully, the cover will be more than pretty, for it must attract prospective readers. It must strike an emotional chord with them. Snag them with preconceptions. Shout quality. Provoke them to wonder what is inside the book. Stimulate them to buy it.

A book cover must do all of those things and more, while competing with thousands of other book covers on mountains of other books stacked around, all playing the same seduction game.

As does the plot of Unspeakable Things: A Novel. A masterful seduction triggers its plot, which spirals off, twisting and turning, entangling the most unlikely characters, all of who will take you on the most unexpected page-turning ride and sometimes leave you gasping for breath.

And the irony of it: I must lure you into buying the novel about a masterful seduction by, in part, seducing you with the front cover of the book. Wish me luck. I will report back.

Life 101, Blog 5, July 26, 2016

Copyright 2016. Jackie Warren Tatum

Which was my question about the title of my novel manuscript I C U, after I read my publisher’s thirteen-page evaluation of it.

The editor said I C U was more than a crime novel and thriller, that “. . . the writing does not use these as crutches. Instead a literary voice accompanies this thrilling plot, moving the reader with devastating truth that resounds in descriptions:

‘I am broken, sitting in the bathtub, letting water run over me, though I do not think there is enough water anywhere to help me. I held a plastic bag of ice against my bottom lip where he bit in deep. It is swollen twice its size. When I lick my lips, I taste him and I get sick to my stomach.

‘If there has ever been fresh air and sunshine and breezes and the sound of birds chirping, they are gone. It is dark here.'”

Then, the publisher’s editor continued—and I blushed reading–that I, as a writer, ” . . . pirouette skillfully from one character and timeline to another, and each figure is masterfully rendered from imagination into a living, breathing person. Renee [the protagonist] is not a cookie-cutter victim: she is a real woman, flawed and broken and overwhelmed and resilient and strong.”

Which gets us back to naming the rose.

And the question of whether or not with the title I C U, my novel would draw in a reader of literary fiction who wants a page-turning crime thriller about pain and loss and death that begins in an I C U waiting area and slaps the reader with the reality of the play on words, I See You, as the pages are flipped through a deteriorating marriage and sexual assault, among other things.

The publisher’s editor said, “In terms of drawing in new readers, I worry that the abbreviation won’t be successful. I suggest a more literary title that plays into the themes of loss and devastation in a woman’s life . . . [and I suggest u]sing A Novel as a subtitle. . . .”

The fifth title she suggested, Unspeakable Things: A Novel, tagged me. And it tagged one of my daughters-in-law.

For, in actuality, my novel manuscript is about unspeakable things.

So, we have named the rose the rose, Unspeakable Things: A Novel, another editing of which the publisher has recommended. Therefore, we shall refine Unspeakable Things: A Novel for you and it will be available for you to pick and sniff in the coming months.

Life 101, Blog 4, May 25, 2016

Copyright 2016. Jackie Warren Tatum

I launched the I C U manuscript this week: pressed the computer button that hurled it through cyberspace to the publisher.

I felt like a mother dropping off her little child at kindergarten for the first day of school. Afraid. Hopeful. Alone. Hoping I’d done the best I could to give the offspring its best chance to be.

Yes, I know that is emotional overkill.

But the truth is that a writer is attached to her writing. Even a fiction novel is a part of the writer.

For though my I C U manuscript is fictional in every respect–its characters, their relationships and conversations and their experiences; its wild crazy plot– it was written from a me that, like I C U’s protagonist, Renee, was widowed as a young woman.

I do not know an actual Renee. None exists as far as I know, but I am and have been me inside.

So, I can write Renee and her pain and vulnerability the way a person can write about Mount Everest who has actually been to Mount Everest and seen the slope of the mountain, its rocks, heard how its ground crunches when she steps on it, seen the light behind it as the sun rises.

Fiction about Renee or Mount Everest or anything else is a product of the writer’s imagination and IS because the writer is the writer who is conjuring up the story.

More details about I C U as this publication process continues.

Life 101, Blog 3, April 23, 2016

Copyright 2016. Jackie Warren Tatum

A person who meditates seeks clearness of mind, emptiness, the place of not thinking without falling asleep, where, it is said, she can tap into “truth.” To arrive in that place, a meditator must sit, motionless, alert, neither resisting nor concentrating on the intrusion of stray thoughts, letting them flow freely, in and out, like an unencumbered dance.

Which reminds me of an encounter with my friend, a decade ago, when she mentioned she danced ballroom weekly. She said, smiling, “Jackie, you should join me sometime.”

I had worn that same smile, I thought, when I was a teen-ager and told people, “I’m gonna be a Radio City Music Hall Rockette when I grow up.”

The Rockette was a no-show; so I taught high school English; later, I practiced law, never thinking much about the Rockette; I assumed she was dead and buried.

But when I accepted the invitation of my smiling friend, the Rockette arose from the dead and began weekly ballroom, Latin, and swing dance lessons that eventually took her to a dance event in New Orleans, where she met a new dance instructor with whom she studied for almost six years.

During the hundreds of hours of dance lessons, the Rockette concentrated on her frame, on her steps, on her turns. One day, for a time, she danced from her muscle memory, not from concentration. Her body and spirit understood enough that she could clear her mind, turn loose, and dance. It was the equivalent of not thinking without falling asleep.

Truth happens that way in a work of fiction, too—no, not truth in terms of facts being accurate—truth that characters and plot unfold which is applicable to humans and life.

It is very difficult to write fiction. And, actually begins, I think, at the beginning, with the novelist being self-intimate. Having a relationship with her self, regardless of from whence it has come, e.g., being familiar with one’s own “not thinking without falling asleep.”

In 2009, when I began my first novel, I C U, I was a green, unskilled, naïve fiction writer. I’d previously free-lanced non-fiction, and all of my attempts at writing fiction had fizzled out. So, I arm-wrestled I C U’s characters, trying to control them. They balked. I persisted. They outsmarted me. One day I gave up, turned them loose to be who they were and began to write. I let them lead the dance. They knew where the truth was.

Seven years into the writing, the I C U novel manuscript is now complete. I am partnering with a publisher to make I C U available, hopefully, by this summer, in soft cover and e-book. I welcome you as a partner in the publication dance and shall keep you informed in future blogs here on my website, and other outlets, of our progress.

Life 101, Blog 2, March 21, 2016

Copyright Jackie Warren Tatum