Killing Dixie – The Process

Posted on by pcmccollum

Killing Dixie is story number sixteen in the #52ShortStories challenge.

**SPOILERS BELOW. If you have not read the story and want to be (hopefully) surprised, come back to this when you’re done.**

As a part of my writer’s hygiene program, I’ve come across so many inspirational articles and essays. The latest was from the Winter 2018 issue of Military History Quarterly. I had never heard of the Confederados, a mass of Confederate soldiers who left the United States for South America (primarily Brazil) after being handed a painful defeat in the American Civil War.

With such a fascinating piece of history in mind, the creative half of my brain began to work its magic on the stories of who those people connected with the movement might have been and the results of the war in general. Some of them kept their way of life, but many ended up freeing their slaves and even setting up schools to educate them.

The hardest part of writing this story was the delicate subject matter, especially in the socially-charged environment in which we currently reside. How do I make someone who owned another human being, no matter who they were by the end of the story, even slightly sympathetic? I hope I succeeded in walking that fine line, but in the end, it’s up to the reader to decide whether or not I was successful.

Here’s the general scratch file:

And the daily journal entries:

-Phillip

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.