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Okay, so here’s the thing (as my son starts just about every sentence)… I’m dingy as heck some times. A complete nimrod. Trying to build a tower without having all the materials.
For weeks, I have been watching totally neato videos posted on YouTube by local resident Chase Baker. He links the videos to All Things Sabine and that is the way I discovered them. The videos are part of a “blog” which seemed to follow a local murder case from the early 1990s.
Chase releases one episode each Sunday, and I generally look forward to watching each one… even though for many weeks, I never fully understood (and sometimes not even partially understood) the meaning of or in these videos. For me, understanding was somewhat irrelevant… as my enjoyment was actually in the uniqueness and interestingness (I know, not a word, but for me it pegs it) of each video. With each production, I felt like I was watching a Cannes-quality short film production shot right here in Sabine Parish Louisiana.
You see, it turns out that Chase Baker, in spite of having minimal equipment and little to no formal training on the art of filming, has a unique eye and he is quite an outstanding director, producer, and cinematographer. He is indeed a talent amongst us, right here in Sabine Parish, Louisiana.
All the locations of the filming are local… around the Zwolle area. That gives the videos that added flavor as it is always interesting for one to see what one is at least somewhat familiar with.
So back to my story… Here I have been, each Sunday evening, watching these curiously interesting videos created, directed and produced by Chase. Last Sunday, I finally couldn’t take it any more… I had to figure out what these videos were about. I thought about contacting Chase… you know, go right to the source, right? But then I decided I didn’t want to look like a complete idiot. So I did something that seems so simple, and yet something as foreign to me sometimes as reading instruction manuals before operating new devices. I read the text with which Chase accompanied the latest episode. And every episode before that.
And there it was, right before my eyes, in far plainer English than most instruction manuals I have avoided… “Read the latest chapter at: http://bigwoodsnovel.blogspot.com.”
Me, the nimrod! Ugh!
“Ah ha!,” I thought excitedly. So there is more! Eureka! I followed Chase’s link, and much to my excitement, I instantly learned there was a story which went with these videos! Ah, sense to be made of these videos after all.
I instantly delved into the story, at first reading from the top down then quickly realizing, “Hey, I’ve got to go back to the beginning!” So I traced back to the very first “chapter” which was written 11 weeks ago. And I began to read. And I read. And I read.
I’m thinking two things as I’m reading this… First, this dude can write! I was hooked quickly and for the most part, his chapters read quite effortlessly. Second, I struggled to figure out which case Chase was writing about. I had it in my mind that he was writing about an actual real live case right here in Sabine Parish. And that presupposition had me racking my brain trying to recall the case.
The case which he writes about was the disappearance of a Zwolle woman in 1993. He accompanies the story with various media… police reports, a coroner’s report, and Polaroid photographs taken at the apparent crime scene as well as in the cemetery where the missing woman was found in a fresh grave. I was the editor of the local newspaper back in 1993, so it was particularly puzzling to me that I could not recall this case. I teetered between thinking two things: First, thinking that this must have been an intentionally and practically miraculously low key case which people (including the press) didn’t generally know about and second, thinking that my long term memory capacity was dwindling.
One of the chapters featured a photo of a newspaper clipping, from the very newspaper I edited back in 1993. Seeing this clipping was the point at which I finally began to see clearly. For those who are unfamiliar with small rural weekly newspapers, the editor is also often the reporter who covers most “beats,” including police news and crime stories. That was me. I read this article, and it initially had me even more puzzled than before… the writing was clearly not my writing. This I knew for cetain. The pagination style was not mine (as editor, I also digitally assembled the news pages of the paper). And yet, the clipping looked so real. But knowing that I reported all the crime-related stories at that time, and knowing for certain this was not my writing, it finally was dawning on me that this was not a true clipping which ultimately meant Chase’s story was not a real life story.
And then, I finally became unstupid. Chase had been quite obvious that this work was not non-fiction. In fact, all along, he refers to it as the “Big Woods Novel.”
Novel, Shannon, think… use your brain!
That’s when I concluded, even more than before, “Kudos to Chase Baker!” He had me practically convinced that this was a real life story.
I couldn’t help myself any longer… I contacted Chase and first complimented his writing style and mad video production skills. Then I asked him, “How in the heck did you come up with this idea?”
Quite simply, he explained. It is based on real life events here and there. The dialogue is fiction, the story is basically fiction, but there is plenty of real life in the story. Partially, it is based on a case elsewhere in Louisiana which Chase had read about with great interest. Some of the characters are based on real life local lawmen whom Chase was familiar with. The places in the story, they are certainly real… Bayou Scie Cemetery, the Zwolle Police Department, Louisiana Hwy. 120, Kwik Trip Convenience Store… So this work is a completely unique mix of real and make believe.
“I wanted the reader to almost question whether it was real or not,” Chase explained.
And, believe me, he is successful in this effort.
He told me, and it provided a bit of relief, that plenty of others have told him the story seems so real that they believed it to be real. He further told me, providing a bit more relief, that I wasn’t the only one who did not realize there is written story which accompanies each of the video episodes.
“I’ve had people ask me, lots of them, about these videos,” Chase said. “Then I tell them about the story, and they had no idea.”
I asked Chase if he realizes he is developing a fan following from this story. A bit humbly, he acknowledged he is definitely becoming “known” locally.
“I am a bit of a socially quiet person,” he explained. “I’ve got the few people I hang out with and beyond that, I don’t ‘know” many people.” Lately, though, he has received hundreds of friend requests on his Facebook page since the blog and video episode posts kicked off. He said people approach him at ball games he attends for his kids and have all sorts of questions for him… So yes, without directly confirming it, I think it’s safe to say that Chase knows he is becoming quite the local sensation.
He is thoroughly enjoying the interest and popularity his story is generating. He downplays the numbers a bit, explaining that his blog and YouTube stats are showing thousands of views but adding that he knows that isn’t big time.
To me, though, thousands of views is big time for a local guy who took a dream of writing a novel from mind to reality… and is carrying out his dream so uniquely so as to reach a maximum audience with a minimal expense. So many people (including myself!) dream of writing, but their storylines never venture far from their minds or perhaps they do write a book but their book never makes it into production (as is the case with I would imagine some 95 percent of all the books ever written). Chase is taking his story straight to the populous via the Internet. And he has my respect and admiration for his willingness to chase his dream, in the here and the now.
Chase is trying to raise some funding to further his production abilities with better equipment (almost everything is shot with an iPhone and using very little equipment) by selling t-shirts bearing the Big Woods logo he created for the novel. The shirts are pretty cool and they are $20 and go to a good cause, if you like to watch videos with a local bite.
As far as how many more chapters and episodes there are to his story, Chase said he has an idea but is not altogether certain.
“I write it from week to week,” he said. Even he doesn’t necessarily know how or when it will end, and that adds to the mystery of it all.
And I love a good mystery.
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Check out the Big Woods novel at this link: http://bigwoodsnovel.blogspot.com/ Just remember, the blog is arranged so that the most recent chapters come up first, so scroll down (trying not to look) to the bottom of each page and click “next” at the bottom right until you get to the very first chapter.