If you don't know, John Jakes is a writer. An awesomely Southern historical writer. He wrote one of my favorite trilogies of all time:
I spent the last summer vacation we ever went on as an entire family reading Love and War (Book 2). It was the summer before my freshman year of high school. I remember lounging in the hotel room in Myrtle Beach while my parents and younger brother were out by the pool or the beach. Obviously, I loved the Mains and the Hazards more than I loved swimming!
When the mini-series aired, my mother wouldn't allow me to watch it. Under no circumstances could I turn on the black and white portable television in my room. Cruel and unusual punishment would follow -- like I'd be grounded from the telephone or I couldn't attend a football game. Oh, the horror!
When I turned 19, I bought the TimeLife North and South Collection with my very first credit card. 24 VCR tapes in a nifty cardboard box that still doesn't hold the tapes very well. I spent the entire two weeks of Christmas break of my freshman year of college staying up until 3 am watching the mini-series and writing a horrid novella. Over the next ten years, I plotted and planned, adding characters and situations, going backwards in time to visit the past, allowing my characters to grow up, marry, and die within the span of...8 books. That's right. Eight.
I never actually wrote those 8 books; I did write 2. (I pulled them out last summer to revise and man, did they suck!) Every now and then I think about those characters, the first characters I created, modeled after characters I loved so dearly, even today. Maybe theirs is a story I'll get back to soon.
