(Explanation, actually. Anything this weird requires explaining!)
When I was a teenager, I was Beatle crazy and so was my younger sister. Every night we would stack an increasing number of their
albums on the record player and crawl into bed to listen and dream. Blessed with an overactive imagination, I wasn't content to
dream about them. I began to make up stories for my sister about how I would get to meet the Beatles and go to England with them. I
remember few of the details of the stories, but they were all as innocent as we were.
Time marched on. I grew up, got married, and left my Beatles albums behind for my other sisters to discover and go through
Beatlemania as a teenage rite of passage.
Having rediscovered the Beatles when their albums came out on CD, my sister and I laughingly recalled those stories when we got
together one Christmas. Later that year we planned a “Sisters Weekend" and while thinking up entertainment for the event, I
remembered the stories. Remembering their innocence—not so much as a kiss!—I decided to write an adult version in the
style of those paperbacks whose cover depicts a maiden with heaving bosom bursting from her gown while held in the shirtless, broad
shouldered, muscular embrace of Fabio.
With a stack of Beatles albums on the CD player to evoke memories and set the mood, I sat down at my computer and started. It was
supposed to be a short, funny, sexy little story, but it just grew and grew! Somewhere along the line, the story decided it wanted to be
a romance, not a parody, and I let it happen. When I found my memories of the sixties a little hazy on facts like whether pantyhose had
been invented yet, I got the old World Book Encyclopedia Yearbooks off the shelf. I went to the library to get books about the Beatles
to get the basic facts of touring dates, marriages, children. My little story was turning into a project, and I was having a blast! I
loved stringing the words together, creating a mood, developing characters, contriving a plot. I tried to fit the story in around
historical facts, but found that facts are very inconvenient! So the result is facts where facts didn't interfere. Well-versed
Beatles fans may find the ‘errors' distracting, but I don't think they will ruin the story for them. For other
readers, I repeat: This is fiction! Don't take dates, events, or interpretations as anything but fiction tossed loosely over a
framework of facts.
Before you read this, a few warnings. Don't expect to find good literature with a carefully crafted plot, good character
development, symbolism, syntax, etc. There is fairly explicit sex – or at least as explicit as I had the nerve to make it! If all that
turns you off, proceed at your own risk and don't say I didn't warn you. You will be bored, intellectually insulted, morally
offended, and appalled that anyone would waste their time on such trash. The rest of us will just kick back and have a nice stroll down
memory lane with a little sex thrown in for spice and romance for ... Well, for whatever the hell romance is for.
Diane
"Into My Life" is now available in paperback and as an ebook!