Little-Known Facts about Outsider Part 1

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I had a great time with my family in Nebraska, but it's a little puzzling to me how one day I'm coming home from Thanksgiving and the next day I'm out on a teetering ladder to put up Christmas lights. (The lights are up and I'm still in one piece, so that's an accomplishment!)

Unfortunately, the Thanksgiving holiday put me behind in proofreading Another Shot. Somehow it was easier to chat and watch college football than it was to proofread, so I'll try to get back into that right away.

Meanwhile, I can regale you with little-known facts about Outsider. I'm sure these will show up in a trivia quiz someday, so you'll be prepared for that!

I started Outsider in May of 1990, about a month after my husband and I bought our first computer, a Macintosh SE. I was so impressed with the little machine that I decided I'd better use it for something, so I started throwing words at it ... and some of them stuck. That first version of the novel was very different than the one that's now published (parts of it were downright awful), but I worked and worked at it until I thought I had something.

Several character names changed throughout the process but the one that never changed is Reggie Hawkins. He's the only character to come from a real person. The original is a man named Kevin. I met him when I worked in the data entry department for a mail-order company in Nebraska. When orders slowed down, I sometimes filled in for the clerk in the maintenance department, where there were two or three men named Mike and one Kevin. Kevin was a lot like Reg: a mechanic, big but not fat, quiet and reserved but always polite to me. One day he offered to let me ride in one of the cherry-picker type of machines that were used to let employees pick items from the colossal shelves in the warehouse. This was many years ago, but I still remember the exhilarating ride that followed: the machine shot forward and the platform rose quickly into the air before descending. I thought it was a lot of fun and told him so. As I recall, he smiled. (I feel that I passed some kind of test by not screaming.) I tried to come up with another name starting with K, but I never found it so I went with the vowels instead: if you look closely, you'll see the similar vowels in Kevin and Reggie. Thanks, Kevin.

More trivia next time!