Bett Norris

Welcome.  I am an author, though that word makes me uncomfortable. I prefer calling myself a writer.  A writer, I tell myself, is a person who writes.  An author is a published writer, and now I can claim that label, because my first novel, Miss McGhee, was released in May 2007. 

I love to write.  I've written short stories and novels, essays, book reviews, even eulogies for famous dead people. 

So let's get right to it.  You can read a little about Miss McGhee, a little about work in progress, and a little about me.  From time to time, I'll post some thoughts. 

Miss McGhee is in bookstores now.  I'll tell you a little about her, and how her story came to get published.  Miss McGhee started life as a secondary, though important, character in another novel that I later put on a shelf.  I thought a lot about this one character, this lady, and started wondering about the circumstances for women like her in that day and time where I'd stuck her, the late forties and fifities, the decades just after World War II.  Then I thought about where I'd placed her, a small town in the deep South, and what was happening in that place and time. 

It so happens that I grew up in a small town in the South.  It also is a matter of coincidence that I've known several ladies like Miss McGhee, for whom the appellation "lady" is more than descriptive.  Women who never married, who made their own way in the world in a time when it wasn't easy for them to do so.  How did they accomplish this, what drove them, how hard was it?  Could I have done it, given the same circumstances?  If not for ladies like Miss McGhee, where would I be today?

Some years ago, on a weekend home to visit my mother, herself a formidable woman who achieved much despite hard times and difficult circumstances, I sat and listened to her talk, prompted by questions from me like, do you remember when. . .?  And I wrote a rough draft, with pen and paper, some 67 pages. 

I dreamed about Miss McGhee, and slept with those crumpled and worn pages next to my bed.  I'd wake up thinking about her, struggling to recall some part of the dreams that fade so quickly, and I'd write.  This went on for years, and through several drafts of the novel.  I reached a point where I couldn't do anything more to it. I was done, tapped out of ideas, though the novel didn't feel finished.  I put it on a shelf with the others gathering dust.

The thing is, I felt like I hadn't done Miss McGhee justice.  She had a story to tell, and it was in my hands, and dependent upon my meager skill and craft.  

I read a book by a remarkable author and the storyline really affected me.  I visited the writer's website, wrote to her, and got some help and a lot of advice.  This author directed me to a free lance editor who was kind enough to take on an unknown and unpublished writer.  I worked for a year re-writing Miss McGhee.  Then I learned about Bywater Books.

Bywater is a company that sponsors a writing contest every year, and the winner gets published.  I had no hope of winning. I was drawn to the unique opportunity to have professionals read the manuscript in its entirety, something that just doesn't happen in the normal process of submitting to publishers on your own.  Usually, they want a query letter, maybe a synopsis, sometimes the first chapter, or the first 30 pages. 

Note: I did not win the contest.  But my goal of having professionals read Miss McGhee paid off.  I got that phone call that every writer dreams about. 

And thus, we are here.  Enjoy the website.  Writers are nothing if not wordy, so I'll be posting comments about various subjects from time to time.  Ya'll pull up a chair.