Artist, Writer & Wild West Woman
Thursday, 28 September 2023
JO. B. CREATIVE!: THE EXTRAORDINARY TOURIST
JO. B. CREATIVE!: THE EXTRAORDINARY TOURIST: A long time ago - some ten years to be precise - I was 'cured' of depression - literally. By pure chance we were introduced to the ...
Thursday, 7 September 2023
JO. B. CREATIVE!: THE STORY I ALWAYS WANTED TO READ
JO. B. CREATIVE!: THE STORY I ALWAYS WANTED TO READ: I have said many times that Alias Jeannie Delaney is the novel I always wanted to read. I possibly didn't know it at the time, but that...
Sunday, 3 September 2023
THE STORY I ALWAYS WANTED TO READ
I have said many times that Alias Jeannie Delaney is the novel I always wanted to read. I possibly didn't know it at the time, but that was probably the case.
During my teens I watched various TV westerns - The Virginian, High Chaparral and Alias Smith and Jones (my westerns had to have humour) and watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the cinema.
But I had begun to daydream before going to sleep scenarios with a cowgirl because very few westerns at the time featured female protagonists who didn't wear long dresses and weren't martyrs, victims or wallflowers. None of them were fast on the draw. I wanted to redress that. So, during my teens, Jeannie was born.
I wanted to write the life story of this person. A Calamity Jane character, only beautiful. When people have asked what I'm writing, I tell them that I'm writing about a Calamity Jane character and they understand that! I began making drawings and paintings of her, and I was beginning to know exactly what she looked like and much of her character, which evolved over the years.
I crafted her appearance and facial features, inspired by various - usually male - images in magazines, until she was exactly how I wanted her. She looks like a gorgeous youth until you look at her smooth skin and more feminine features. Then you know she's a woman. An extremely sexy one!
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Her fashion sense is very much cowboy, but as the years passed, that evolved until she had developed a strong sense of male dressing with panache and style, whether rough and ready or very classy.
And of course she's the fastest gun in the west! That goes without saying.
Her sexuality developed too. To my embarrassment I visualized her kissing girls, and this excited me tremendously, making me wonder about myself - no issues there, essentially - until I realised that she was bisexual. That took a while to admit to hubby, who was the first person to whom I dared relate the story. 'So what?' He said.
As to her personality..
She can be overwhelmingly charismatic. She's funny and kind, and gentle towards her girlfriends, kids, animals and older people.
I wondered if she was OTT (over the top). Maybe. But I couldn't help but write her like that, and I felt extremely excited doing so. And again - so what? And that would be a great reason for others to be dead jealous of her and for men to want to kill her. Her charismatic power and phenomenal gun threatens them.
So I crafted the story and it became just as I wanted it. Jeannie Morgan is the embodiment of the female I wanted as my cowgirl protagonist who falls into fist and gun fights with gusto and sometimes wins and sometimes doesn't.
Every scenario was considered with the traditional western in mind, with one exception - my hero is a woman, and a bloody good looking one at that. Unlike Calamity Jane who looked like the back end of a hoss, bless her.
In my scenarios in my head, Jeannie is treated like a bloke, and I love it and so does she. I won't tell you how it all ends in book three, but I will tell you that I'm delighted with the result, and I'm convinced that no-one else has written anything like this. I'm not saying that I'm unique as a writer, because no-one is, but every western plot I see, with the exception of Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead, are not the plots I want to read.
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At the beginning of my story there were no stories like Jeannie's, and I doubt very much that she would have been acceptable back then, during the eighties, but today she's liberated. There are any number of female led westerns, and I should be jolly pleased. I am, I think, but the childish part of me thinks: 'Aww... I wanted to be unique...'
(Get over it. You're published. Be grateful)
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Saturday, 2 September 2023
JO. B. CREATIVE!: ARTIST & AUTHOR OR AUTHOR & ARTIST?
JO. B. CREATIVE!: ARTIST & AUTHOR OR AUTHOR & ARTIST?: I was always an artist first, long before I started writing. I drew and painted in all kinds of media - oil paints as I grew up, gouache, wa...