Yeah, I do.
I've decided it.
That's gonna be something I do eventually.
The thought crept into my subconscious as early as my high school years, but I simply had no clue as to what I'd write it about. I'm not a fiction person, so I know it would not be countless pages of self-indulgent, pseudo-creative, melodramatic crap.
I'm a non-fiction fan. The only stuff I ever read is non-fiction: History, sports history, sociology, culinary, cultural. That kind of subject matter.
That's not to say that I know what my book will be about once I come to the point where I feel qualified enough mentally to write it. I mean, you can't just sit down a write a book. Well, not unless you're writing self-indulgent, pseudo-creative, melodramatic crap. Few people have the ability to write good fiction. Mark Twain is one. But you know his stuff was so deeply founded in personal experience/environment that it was almost like when you see a movie and it has the "based on a true story" disclaimer.
I'm not saying I'm some kind of literary expert. There are plenty of good fictional works, but you have to go pretty far back. Harper Lee. John Steinbeck. People like that. Not John Grisham or Michael Crichton. Those are to fictional best-sellers what American Idol and The Bachelor are to American television culture.
Crap that the masses like because they're stupid and easy to please.
Yeah, Jurassic Park was an awesome movie, but who's going to read 600 pages of dinosaurs tearing apart an island off the Costa Rican coast when you can just wait for the movie to come out. It's not like that's confronting some all-encompassing cultural issue like To Kill a Mockingbird.
I didn't mean to go off on that tangent.
Anyway, I'm not sure what my book will be about, but I was thinking how much I'd like to write a guide to Ark-La-Tex restaurants. Not restaurants like you're thinking, but dynastic establishments, such as Herby K's in Shreveport, the catfish place that caters the press box at Texas High football games in Texarkana, and Lucky Charm's in Carthage. It would take a couple of years of research, which would be fun to say the least.
My idea comes from John T. Edge's Southern Belly, "the ultimate food-lover's companion to the South." He goes everywhere from I-35 to the Shenandoah to Central Florida, chronicling long-lived food establishments in metropolitan areas, mid-sized cities, small towns, and roadside tamale shacks in the Mississippi Delta, giving the history behind the food and the restaurants/eateries/shacks/stands, too.
That's cool. It combines history with culture. It's sociological. It's culinary. It tastes good.
It could be like Edge's book on a smaller scale, detailing the famous places of my home region. (I claim the Ark-La-Tex before I claim Texas or the United States. My mom says I'm too caught up in provincialism. Get over it, Teresa.)
So that's my idea. I've also thought about maybe writing a book about the history of the NJCAA Region XIV Conference, the JUCO men's basketball conference that includes schools from the Red River at the Texas-Oklahoma border south to Baytown. I grew up around the league and know a little about it, and it's the kind of niche subject that not a whole lot of other people would really know about. Maybe somebody would be interested, though.
This isn't a money-making thing. I just think it'd be fun.
And since my days in journalism are numbered, I think it'd be cool to return to my writing roots at some point, especially after I get that graduate degree.
OK. That's all I got.
