First and foremost, thank you to all of you who have read my past blogs and my book, “Homey’s Adventures.”
Without boring you with too many details. I recently had another contentious discussion about what is fiction and what is nonfiction. I found the following online:
- Fiction is not true, and non-fiction is true
- While Non-fiction focuses on ideas or events that actually took place, fiction tends to be focusing on imaginary ideas and events.
- Fictions are made up stories and Non-fictions are entirely fact-based writings.
- Fictions are just entertainers and on the other hand non-fictions are informative.
Based on this, “Homey’s Adventures” and my new book, “Homey’s Adventures Too.” is undoubtedly fiction. If anyone believes Homey is a real person and not just a fictional character in my mind, then they need more help than I do. It is true that some of Homey’s adventures are based on actual events, but that is true for most romance novels.
I just finished watching the Netflix series “Jane the Virgin.” Jane is a romance novelist who gets accidentally artificially inseminated and for 6 years writes about her experiences. In other words, it is a romance TV series about how a woman writes two romance novels based on her soap opera life. So, it is fiction about writing fiction and it is a soap opera.
My point is that just because “Homey’s Adventures” has some basis in fact, it is not nonfiction. I also have written a lot of nonfiction over the years. I authored Actuarial technical papers and one of these papers was an award-winning paper. So, I am familiar with both genres.
Bottom line, I think the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is pointless except to a librarian or a book seller who needs to point out where a genre is. The most important thing is what the reader likes.
For example, I have discovered that I would rather watch paint dry than to read another Jane Austin book. I would rather bang my head against a wall than to read another E.L. James book. However, there are millions of readers across the world who have bought, read, and cherished these books. Who am I to say something against them?
I only care about what I write and what my reader wants to read. I wrote “Homey’s Adventures” because I am passionate about writing about love. I once wrote an analogy talking about my passion and Pygmalion:
Pygmalion was a Greek artist who created a sculptor of a beautiful woman and he fell in love with his work. The Greek goddess Venus made the sculpture a real woman because Pygmalion desired her so much.
George Bernard Shaw wrote a play about an English aristocrat who made a flower girl into a lady of high society and named the play “Pygmalion”. Lerner and Lowe made a movie based on the play and named it “My Fair Lady”.
When I was working, I took management classes that taught what they called the Pygmalion effect. They taught that if you believed someone was bad, then it was more likely they became bad. If you believed someone was good, then it was more likely they became good.
All of this has a central theme of dreaming about something and taking actions to make those dreams come true.
My books are good examples. After my divorce, my dream was to find and marry the woman of my dreams. My Pygmalion sculpture is my book. Only God knows when my dream will come true. Both my books are my passion and I pray and hope that you my reader will share that passion with me.
If you want to learn more about Jim and Homey, please visit my website: www.homeysadventures.com. You can read the first two chapters for free there. You can also buy my book from the website or Amazon or many other fine retailers. Just search for “Homey’s Adventures” by Jim Wish. I am still working on getting my second book published, but I have shared excerpts of it with you in my past blogs.
Jimwish.com 