Small Town News
It is hard to believe that eight years have passed since the publication of my first book, Small Town News. After a long delay, the book is now available as an e-book.
The book centers around the events that took place in Diamond, Missouri, on October 31, 2001, when the bank was robbed and my boss, Diamond School Superintendent Dr. Greg Smith, disappeared. His body was found 11 days later in a pond just outside the DIamond city limits.
The following description, which includes the evolution of my writing prior to Small Town News was published in 2005 in my blog, The Turner Report:
I wrote my first book-length manuscript (calling it a novel would be charitable, when I was 14 years old, a freshman at East Newton High School. It was 289 pages long and was titled A Song For Susan. I no longer have any copies of that work, only a cover page that somehow survived over the past 35 years. The only thing I remember about it is that it was terrible.
During my teen years, I wrote four more book-length manuscripts, none of which were memorable and had absolutely no success marketing them because they simply were not marketable. Since I was a terrible typist and did not have much patience or a good enough typewriter to work with, my friend Barbara McNeely did my typing for me, for very little pay.
Sadly, Barbara, a student at Missouri Southern State College at the time, was stabbed to death in September 1977 behind Northpark Mall after returning from an errand she ran for her employer, J. C. Penney. The man who killed her was found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent a few short years in a mental hospital and then was released into society without a word to anyone, thanks to the culpability of the Missouri State Health Department and the state attorney general at the time, Bill Webster.
Not having Barbara around took a lot of the joy out of everything for her friends for a long time, and since I have always been a person who takes an extra long time getting over anything, it was nearly a couple of years after her death before I started writing again.
The year was 1979 and by this time, I was the editor of the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald and living in Lockwood. After covering night time events, I returned to the Luminary-Herald office on Main Street in Lockwood and sat in the front area, pounding out a novel, Sudden Death on an old Underwood manual typewriter. Some of the characters in Small Town Newswere originally created for Sudden Death, which revolved around the murder of a high school team's star quarterback just before the state football playoffs. I had no luck marketing it, which is probably just as well. Though it was better than A Song for Susan and the other book-length manuscripts I wrote while I was in my teens, it still lacked something. A few days after I finished writing "Sudden Death," Boone Newspapers shut down the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald.
After that, it was 23 years before I started writing again. I suppose I should qualify that. I have always been writing. I estimated that during my newspaper days, I wrote more than 20,000 articles, averaging more than 1,000 a year. But even though I had left fiction behind, it was always in the back of my mind.
When Dr. Smith disappeared, I was a couple of months into my third year of teaching at Diamond Middle School. It was a discussion in one of my classes that led me to think about trying once again to write a novel. The following passage comes from a Turner Report post I wrote yesterday:
At the time, I was teaching current issues, a writing-intensive class, at Diamond Middle School. In one of my classes, we discussed the situation and I was surprised by the vehemence of the opinions students had about the behavior of the media during the whole situation. They were particularly disturbed by the way Dr. Smith's widow was treated and the scope of the questions with which she was bombarded. Almost 100 percent of the students thought the media should leave the woman alone.
The student comments got me thinking about writing the book, which is a fictionalized version of those events. The focus is on the media, as seen through the eyes of a student, a high school junior named Tiffany Everett who has a one-week internship with one of the three local television stations.
Within the 196 pages of the book, the way the media handles news in a small town is scrutinized though the actions of the high school junior, her teacher, the television reporter to whom she is assigned, and the editor of the town's newspaper.
So much has taken place since the original publication of Small Town News. I regret that I abandoned my attempts to write books for more than two decades. That will not happen again.
The book centers around the events that took place in Diamond, Missouri, on October 31, 2001, when the bank was robbed and my boss, Diamond School Superintendent Dr. Greg Smith, disappeared. His body was found 11 days later in a pond just outside the DIamond city limits.
The following description, which includes the evolution of my writing prior to Small Town News was published in 2005 in my blog, The Turner Report:
I wrote my first book-length manuscript (calling it a novel would be charitable, when I was 14 years old, a freshman at East Newton High School. It was 289 pages long and was titled A Song For Susan. I no longer have any copies of that work, only a cover page that somehow survived over the past 35 years. The only thing I remember about it is that it was terrible.
During my teen years, I wrote four more book-length manuscripts, none of which were memorable and had absolutely no success marketing them because they simply were not marketable. Since I was a terrible typist and did not have much patience or a good enough typewriter to work with, my friend Barbara McNeely did my typing for me, for very little pay.
Sadly, Barbara, a student at Missouri Southern State College at the time, was stabbed to death in September 1977 behind Northpark Mall after returning from an errand she ran for her employer, J. C. Penney. The man who killed her was found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent a few short years in a mental hospital and then was released into society without a word to anyone, thanks to the culpability of the Missouri State Health Department and the state attorney general at the time, Bill Webster.
Not having Barbara around took a lot of the joy out of everything for her friends for a long time, and since I have always been a person who takes an extra long time getting over anything, it was nearly a couple of years after her death before I started writing again.
The year was 1979 and by this time, I was the editor of the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald and living in Lockwood. After covering night time events, I returned to the Luminary-Herald office on Main Street in Lockwood and sat in the front area, pounding out a novel, Sudden Death on an old Underwood manual typewriter. Some of the characters in Small Town Newswere originally created for Sudden Death, which revolved around the murder of a high school team's star quarterback just before the state football playoffs. I had no luck marketing it, which is probably just as well. Though it was better than A Song for Susan and the other book-length manuscripts I wrote while I was in my teens, it still lacked something. A few days after I finished writing "Sudden Death," Boone Newspapers shut down the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald.
After that, it was 23 years before I started writing again. I suppose I should qualify that. I have always been writing. I estimated that during my newspaper days, I wrote more than 20,000 articles, averaging more than 1,000 a year. But even though I had left fiction behind, it was always in the back of my mind.
When Dr. Smith disappeared, I was a couple of months into my third year of teaching at Diamond Middle School. It was a discussion in one of my classes that led me to think about trying once again to write a novel. The following passage comes from a Turner Report post I wrote yesterday:
At the time, I was teaching current issues, a writing-intensive class, at Diamond Middle School. In one of my classes, we discussed the situation and I was surprised by the vehemence of the opinions students had about the behavior of the media during the whole situation. They were particularly disturbed by the way Dr. Smith's widow was treated and the scope of the questions with which she was bombarded. Almost 100 percent of the students thought the media should leave the woman alone.
The student comments got me thinking about writing the book, which is a fictionalized version of those events. The focus is on the media, as seen through the eyes of a student, a high school junior named Tiffany Everett who has a one-week internship with one of the three local television stations.
Within the 196 pages of the book, the way the media handles news in a small town is scrutinized though the actions of the high school junior, her teacher, the television reporter to whom she is assigned, and the editor of the town's newspaper.
So much has taken place since the original publication of Small Town News. I regret that I abandoned my attempts to write books for more than two decades. That will not happen again.
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