Tiny Taste of Quit Happens by Jeanie Johnson and Jayha Leigh

unedited excerpt

Founded shortly after the Revolutionary War, Pleasanton, North Carolina was the kind of town that was stereotypically southern.  In Pleasanton, you were a farmer, a farmer’s wife, a preacher, a preacher’s wife, a small business owner, or retired.  You could also be dead, but then you weren’t really adding to the GDP so dead didn’t count.

An hour outside of the port city of Wilmington, Pleasanton had one main street, three traffic lights, a barbeque joint, a chicken restaurant, a garage, and four churches (two of them Baptist) packed in its ten square miles.  Nine thousand residents and fifteen hundred dogs (half of them hunting) called the town home.  Almost every house had a front porch, a pickup truck on the gravel driveway, a Bible in the sitting room, sweet tea in the fridge, and at least two rifles somewhere on the premises.  Of the 9,000 residents, 33 percent were Caucasian; 30 percent were African-American; 20 percent were Native-American; the rest were a mix of all of the above; and a full 23 percent of them were certifiable, meaning if you dragged them to an asylum someone would give you a sack of potatoes and a fifty dollar check for bringing them. 

 

All rights reserved.  Copyright by Jeanie Johnson and Jayha Leigh

There Are No Goats, Half-Naked Men or Twerking in This Blog Post…Read It Anyway

NB: Insert photo of half-naked hotness just to trick them

We are women of many names; however, most of our readers know us as Jeanie and Jayha (J and J).  As prose artists, we like to write a particular way: our way.  While we could write within the norm, we prefer to create bespoke stories.  Hand-tailored for a luxurious reading experience, our stories look good on paper and feel good in our heads.  Our prose doesn’t however fit neatly into categories, but neither do we as writers.  Our prose flows outside of the lines.  Characters bitch slap the plot all over the page.  And we let them because we enjoy the end result even if we loathe the process.  We don’t pants a damn thing because like every great master plan, the devil’s in the details.  We plot.  Muhaahahah.

Having more than our fair shares of awesomeness, one would think we come to the story with arrogance knowing we’re going to beat it into a bestseller.  We might be a tiny bit arrogant but we come to each story with bribes in the form of cookies and bacon, hoping to trick it into doing what we want.  Does it work? Hey, what happens during a rough draft and the edit and proofing sessions, stays there. 

So what is the point of the first two paragraphs and the photo of the half-naked dude you ask?  The half-naked dude is there to ogle and to distract you from any glaring error.  The point of the first two paragraphs is to get us to the point, which is: Jeanie and Jayha have returned…kind of like the Jedi but without the Deathstar. NB: We don’t own that because if we did, we probably wouldn’t be up at 1 am writing a blog post.  Just saying. 

—Jeanie and Jayha

We apologize.  We meant to insert a photo of a half-naked dude but all we had on hand was an all naked dude.