This novel, or at least I hope it's a novel, will be based on my Grandma Margo who I loved dearly. She never talked about her past, so what I dig up about her past will be entirely separate from my personal relationship with her. Personally, she was just a great grandma: she welcomed us to her home, she cooked for us, she put all of us grandkids on her lap, and she had an unending positive relationship with all of us.
But she had an interesting life, too, and that's what I want to dig up. Most of the above is fairly typical, and if I get to the part where she's a good grandma, I'll be ready to finish and put the book away. The meat of the book will be culled from a scrapbook that I found that was passed down to me through my mother. Somehow she filed away lots of letters, dance cards, pictures, yearbook pages, that kind of thing, and I plan on going through it carefully, scanning much of it, and putting it in the book.
One of the interesting aspets of it is her mother (see a couple of posts down), Elizabeth Mansfield, who was theatrical and encouraged her daughter to act in theatre performances. For this reason the scrapbook has a lot of theatre bills from Toledo in the early part of the century - 1910's, 1920's, etc., so the book will really take a close-up look at what Toledo was like in that era. That's actually what I'm really interested in researching. I want to know what it was like, and I want to convey it as an author. I experienced Toledo in the 1950's and early 1960's, and I know they had a little in common - they were the same city - but to me a little background will make this a very intense novel.
Not sure if this will be next on my plate. I'm dying to do it. But I have one more big one that I have to do as well, about language. And I'm considerting still working on a string of novels; my novel was so much fun, and so well-received, that I can't resist continuing on my string. Stay tuned. My autobiography is almost finished.
