Picnic Areas and Picnic Sites

The White House
Washington

Hi there. I am tapping this out in California. My novel BLACK PRESIDENT was published by Picnic in Britain in November 2008. I am an independent movie producer and when not filming or editing usually write non-fiction between teaching gigs. Around 1997 or 1998 I got a concept of following the lives of a black family where one child, secretly an illegitimate son of JFK, grows up in America. I figured there must have been at least one woman JFK seduced who decided to keep her child. At some point in the writing it became obvious that the child should rise to be a candidate for the Presidency. And as I wrote out his childhood experiences I decided to also include the US political climate and timelines, re-write all those poisonous historical moments from the 1960’s on that had clogged my consciousness, the assassinations and secret Ops, presidential plottings, imagining it all from the point of view of the perpetrators. Basically, BLACK PRESIDENT is a distillation of my research of forty years of US history, politics and subterfuge right up to the present. The novel concludes in the White House 2012. Not too many places to picnic around there . . .

Rick Schmidt
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