February 3, 2005
I have always loved the book Gone With the Wind, and the movie made of the same. I was so disappointed with the sequel, Scarlett, that the idea came to me to write a "requel," a different sequel that would basically ignore the one that came out. But in the course of plotting out my own version, I found myself concentrating on the relationship between the hero, Rhett Butler, and his prostitute/ paramour with a heart of gold, Belle Watling, and their illegitimate child that is clearly referred to in both book and movie. What started to take shape was a prequel, covering the 1850-61, the 11 years prior to that during which Gone With the Wind takes place.
As I was writing it, news came out that Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, etc.) had broken off negotiations with the Margaret Mitchell estate for "The Autobiography of Rhett Butler," designed as the official "prequel" for GWTW. The notoriously conservative estate would not approve of certain controversial topics, such as miscegenation. From my position of editor of Genre, I attempted to write St. Martin’s Press and pitch my own ideas. Not surprisingly, I never heard back.
Nonetheless I wrote 5 chapters, and I think they are quite decent. Regardless of the relative impossibility of getting it published, I would like to work on it again, and there is a built-in fan base which may be attracted to it via the Internet. I doubt very much it will even get enough attention to attract a Cease and Desist order from the estate, but I believe that if one is not actually publishing a work, Internet spinoffs are allowed.
So, for fans and the merely curious, following please find the first installment (a little tease, really). More will follow. If you like it, let me know. It will motivate me to get up earlier every day and pound out a few pages. Who knows? It may serve as audition piece for something else entirely.
RHETT AND BELLE
Prologue
Belle Watling was tired of war.
It was the hot summer of 1850, and Fort Sumter was just another place name on a map, as were Gettysburg, Antietam, Spotsylvania, and Appomattox. The cataclysm that was to wrench those places and all places in the American universe was still a decade and a million lives away. The war which engaged Belle was of far greater scope, longer duration, and held far less prospect of peace or surrender than a mere war between the states ever would. Belle’s war was every woman’s war.
The war between the sexes.
It was a man’s world, a white man’s world at least, and the weapons were many for the men and few for the women. A woman’s power was almost always dependent on her relationship to a male, a function of her status as a daughter, wife or mother. The exceptions were women who were nobody’s daughter, wife or mother—at least in the eyes of the world. Nuns and prostitutes were both sides of the same mirror. Nuns held the limited power they held by the complete rejection of sex; prostitutes held their power by the embrace of it. Belle was no nun, but she was a hell of a prostitute. And for nuns or prostitutes, two cardinal rules were ironically the same.
Don’t fall in love.
Don’t bear a child.
So it made little sense when Belle Watling did both.
The father was the one man to have challenged the self-imposed celibacy that had been Belle’s reward to herself as proprietor of a bordello who didn’t need to entertain customers.
He was the one man to have pierced an emotional armor so well in place that Belle had long forgotten a time when it was separate from her very constitution.
He was the one man Belle had ever fallen in love with.
His name was Rhett Butler.
More tomorrow. All goes well. I’m off the see my Parole Officer.
MCO 2005
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