George Kennedy:
CLASS OF 1978
Palatka High SchoolClass of 1978
Palatka, FL
George's Story
George is from Palatka, Florida. George's schools include Palatka High School. George later attended Miami Dade Community College/St. John's CC/Lake City CC/Santa Fe CC. George works(ed) at Self.
One of George's favorite quotes is:"1) "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" Shakespeare
2) "those that care, don't matter. those that matter, don't care" Dr. Seuss
3) "if your output exceeds your intake, your upkeep will be your downfall"
Owner of Comfort Cab of River City
Single/two adult children, ake George & April/one sister, aka Kat
AUTHOR’S INTERVIEW,
REPRINTED IN PART FROM THE LAKE REGION MONITOR:
May 12, 2005 Monitor Page 7A
Keystone novelist George Kennedy has written a thriller,
and is looking nationwide for an interested publisher.
KEYSTONE AUTHOR SEEKS PUBLISHER
By JAMES WILLIAMS, LRM Editor
George Kennedy resides “out past High Ridge,” where he enjoys the peace and quiet. He’s lived in the Keystone area for 15 years, and calls himself the poet laureate of [Sabo’s American Italian Restaurant] in Keystone.
Now, he’s written some poems and a serial killer novel and he’s looking for a publisher.
Kennedy has knocked around and been knocked around. He’s 44, was born in Gainesville, and lived in Palatka as a younger man.
He attended various community colleges but couldn’t handle Algebra II’s polynomial equations and never graduated.
Kennedy has worked as a bartender, a licensed realtor, a carpenter, a plumber and builder.
He wanted to be a lawyer until he went through a nasty divorce, and decided too many Americans were buying tickets in a litigious lottery.” He said law students still cite Kennedy vs. Kennedy. He said he and his ex-wife get along fine now. He gets along well with his two children, a son 17, and a daughter 28.
Kennedy’s novel, which he has entitled “Emasculation,” is a hefty tome. He guesses the bound manuscript’s [386] double-spaced pages weigh three to five pounds, about the size of “a nice-sized bass.” He once read it straight through in fifteen hours.
As is traditional in the in the publishing industry, Kennedy has sent out query letters with the book’s first fifty pages to numerous editors and agents. It costs him as much as [$110.00] every time he prints out a complete copy and mails off the entire book to another publisher. And that’s j...Expand for more
ust to get a rejection form letter from a publisher or literary agent who may or may not have read any of it. He has received 14 rejections so far, but he plans to keep going. He also plans to send it to Island Publishers who printed “Silence of the Lambs.”
On his laptop, Kennedy keeps an extensive computerized file of all the publishers and agents he has sent it to, or plans to send it to. He knows what date and time he mailed off each manuscript and updates each entry with any progress.
Kennedy says 75 percent of “Emasculation” is autobiographical. “The only thing that is not me is the actual homicides,” he said. He’s learned the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath on the Internet. He’s studied the Green River Killer, and said Wichita’s BTK (bind, torture, kill) serial killer basically got upset because he lived in a small town and didn’t get enough publicity.
Much of Kennedy’s book is the result of research; he had to study everything from the anopheles mosquito to which scale measures what organ during an autopsy.
Last week Kennedy described his book as “a political metaphor asserting conservative principles in the guise of a detective thriller,” which sounds scary enough….
The actual plot involves the disappearance of a torch singer from a Miami jazz club. The protagonist befriends a detective who is investigating the brutal homicides of several young women. The killer in Kennedy’s book was abused as a child by his alcoholic mother, among others, and grows up to stalk young women. He lures one to his [truck] at a Dairy Queen.
The Keystone author started the book in 1995. His “quasi-autobiographical novel” took only nine months to write but another [two] year[s] to edit and rewrite. His literary guru, June Rothschild a former professor at FSU, edited and approved of his book, but she isn’t a publisher.
Kennedy says no matter whether his novel sells, the experience of writing it was worth the effort. “It motivated me to write others,” he said.
He’s already working on a sequel to his first novel, and on a children’s book where a family goes to a new planet recently discovered by the Hubble telescope.
In the future, Kennedy says, “I would like to be going out to the mailbox to pick up residual checks.” But in the meantime, he said, he’s “learned a lot about literature."".
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