Eight Months from Start to Finish
By Barbara W. Russell
Phyllis Glisson started writing short stories when she was a teenager, but she never dreamed that she’d be writing professionally – she mainly wrote stories to entertain her friends.
“My friends would always want me to write short stories that had them in it, and some famous celebrities, or heart throb, at the time,” she said, “so I would make up stories, and then we’d all have slumber parties, and they’d all come over to my house and then they’d go, ‘Hey – Phyllis is going to tell a story!’ and so I would make up stories –and they loved it.”
High school friends weren’t the only ones who appreciated Glisson’s ability to tell a good story. One of her high school English teachers at Savannah Christian was Mr. Eddington. “I never will forget that man,” she said, “I loved English class! He gave us a writing assignment to write a short story, and of course I didn’t follow protocol – I wrote a one act play. He graded it as best he could, but then he also told me that he thought I really had talent and asked me to be in the writer’s club.” Ironically, she didn’t join the writer’s club. “I was working too hard just to graduate,” she explained.
Her writer’s life became something in her past until she was laid off from a job in May, 2008. She and her husband, Billy, to whom she’s been married for almost 29 years, had started a successful business, so they did not feel the financial need for her to find another job, but she did need to find something to keep her busy. “There was only so much housework I could do,” she said, “so I took up painting as a way to pass the time.”
Landscapes were mainly what she painted, and her Shi-Tzu puppy, Lilu.” I was moderately successful,” she said. “I got some commissions, but after painting 40 or 50 pictures, I ran out of ideas. I wasn’t inspired. I was burned out I guess.” So she looked elsewhere to fill her void.
“I’ve always been an avid reader – a great lover of books,” she said, and that love led her to becoming a novelist.
Glisson’s daughter, Roxy, also writes stories, songs and poetry, and they decided to co-author a novel. They brainstormed together about the plot for a romance/mystery novel, and worked together on the first chapter, but by the time the first chapter was finished, Glisson was working on it alone. After only eight months of writing solo, the novel was completed. “Sometimes I would write for 11 hours straight. Sometimes I couldn’t type fast enough – the ideas were pouring on until 1:00 or 2:00 am,” she said.
One would have to be pretty comfortable to write until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, and Glisson does have a favorite writing place in her home. “I don’t sit at a desk and type,” she says. “I sat at a desk for eight years, working for a lawyer, then a construction company, and I do not want to sit at a desk if I can help it.” Instead, her favorite comfy writing place is sitting on her Scottish plaid couch in the living room. Glisson sets her laptop computer on the arm of the couch, and Lilu sits on her lap- “sort of.” Her other two small dogs, Oreo ‘Cookie’ Monster and ‘Diva’ Las Vegas, sit on the couch beside her, and that’s where she types away.
Background noise is also part of Glisson’s writing place. Sometimes she puts the TV on, “kinda low,” and sometimes she puts her headphones on and listens to music she has recorded to her laptop. “For this book here,” she pats the cover of her novel, Her Sanctuary, “I played the soundtrack from ‘Twilight’ over and over and over.” She laughs, as though that’s a silly thing, but I wonder how the emotions of the music have added to the emotions of the novel. It entices me to read it.
Glisson’s novel is a Romance/Mystery, and it has already received several five star reviews. The story is about a woman who is escaping ten years of an abusive marriage. She travels to the fictional town of Sanctuary, Arizona, where she meets and falls in love with a half-breed loner who has a questionable past. It’s a story of love and healing in a town that’s filled with hate and prejudice.
Glisson chose to self-publish her book, and she’s happy about that decision. “This book is my heart and soul, because (when you self publish) you have to make so many decisions. For example, you have to edit your book and design the cover and colors – This book is my baby.” She also made the decision to use ‘P.Q. Glisson’ as her pen name. The “Q” stands for Quattlebaum which is her maiden name.
How did Glisson learn to write a novel? It seems like she’s a natural. She’s never taken a writing course, and she doesn’t read books or magazines about writing – she just sits down on her Scottish plaid couch, surrounded by her dogs, and starts writing for as long as the ideas keep coming. “I edit every day from what I wrote the day before to make sure it flows, and that the right word and punctuation are used,” she said. “It helps me to continue the flow of the story. I rewrite a lot.”
Does she have a writing schedule? “No,” she says. “I really should treat it as a job, because it is what I do now, but I just can’t seem to discipline myself like that, but I really enjoy it – I don’t want it to be a job – I want it to be fun.”
Presently, Glisson is continuing to write, but now she’s in the process of writing two novels at the same time. She didn’t plan it that way. She first began writing a period romance novel which is called The Scent of a Rose. It’s about a blind 18 year old woman who is the sole heiress to a family fortune, and it’s set in Charleston before the Civil War.
The other novel she’s writing is a young adult novel. “I had a dream,” she said, “and the young adult novel came to me. It came right before I drifted off to sleep, and I said, I need to get on that and write an outline. The next day I wrote an outline. I knew where I wanted it to start – in the classroom, and I knew I wanted it to be almost like a teenager was writing the book. I just started writing and then it just went, and I said ‘This feels pretty good,’ and I just kept going, and before I knew it I had like 15 or 16 pages done, and I said, ‘Okay, this is not an outline anymore! This is turning into a book.’ But I started working on the other one, but this one kept calling me back, so I had to go back to it and I’m working on it right now.”
Writing two novels at the same time doesn’t seem to be difficult for Glisson, and she doesn’t have a schedule. Whichever one she works on each day is “pretty much a feeling,” she says. But one thing is for sure – she is fully immersed in her writing career.
Recently Glisson was talking with a good friend from her high school years named Ellen. Ellen is actually one of the friends who went to slumber parties and listened to Glisson’s story telling. They were questioning why Glisson had not used her writing talent as a career until now.
“I think that all your life you’ve always had a path,” said Ellen. “You’ve always had something to do – a career, the family, and everything. You just never concentrated on yourself. And, when you got laid off, and you were sitting at home with nothing to do. It allowed you to be still, and that allowed your creative juices to start flowing, and it just started coming to you.”
“And you know,” Glisson told her, “I think you might be right, because I never did sit still enough.”
Although it seems that Glisson is a natural born storyteller, and that her writing career has been easy for her, she tells with honesty that much in her life has been difficult:
“It seems that most of my life I have been struggling to overcome, whether it was stage fright when singing in front of a crowd or problems with self-esteem.
I have struggled with self-image and crushing depression. I can’t remember when I didn’t have money problems. It was all I could do sometimes just to get out of bed.
You’re probably thinking, “Wow, she’s such a sad person,” but you would be wrong. You see, the one thing that you don’t know is that I never allowed the obstacles in my life to overtake me because I know all things happen for a reason. God loves me and He will be with me no matter what.
People who know me will say that I am a happy, bubbly person. It’s not an act. I praise God everyday for what I have. There are so many people out there who are in a lot worse shape than I am. So I go out and when I see a little old lady struggling to reach a box on the shelf, I reach up and grab it for her. Just that small gesture makes me feel better and reaffirms my purpose. So the next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, take stock in what you do have, and rejoice.”
And I say “Amen” to that.
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