On Monday, November 8, 2010, The Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer published an article about me and my novel in Suzi Bartholomy's Region section column, Road Trips. In the print version it was headlined NOVEL APPROACH -- Eaton Publishes Second Book, while the online article, which was identical in every other respect, was titled (more interestingly, I thought) "Eaton's bawdy book gets wife's approval."
The article was professional and accurate, detailing my career (or lack thereof) as a writer. It revealed one piece of information lots of my friends didn't know, that I once wrote for the romance/confessions market, which prints stories of overwrought emotional content on subjects ranging from illicit romance to other more mundane life problems. These are presented as being true, and perhaps they are nowadays, but when I was impressing female editors by pretending to be a lady writer, the magazines often had "how-to" articles in Writers Digest and other writer's publications. They weren't all made up out of the whole cloth--well, a few of mine were--but the "truth" that was present was probably no more prominent than existed in most fiction stories. Which is to say, most fiction is based on something, some germ of truth, however tiny. These stories were written in the first person, from a female viewpoint. At first I struggled with this. What did I know about the way women thought or felt deep inside? (I was younger then.) But my older sister Benita, who was practically making a living writing confessions, gave me courage. Her females talked like truck drivers. As, in fact, most women really do. So I cut off the frills and wrote the same way I would have had I been writing about men. It worked.
The MI article received a good deal of attention on Facebook, where many of my friends had read it, and proceeded to comment on it. I also got a few phone calls. But I didn't know I was actually getting my fifteen minutes of fame until a mail carrier came to my door with a package. I had never seen the man before. As he handed over the package, he smiled and said, "Nice article!
And indeed it was.
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