Have you always wanted to become a novelist? Here's one path to success.
Be an award-winning rapper. Go to prison on weapons charges. Get released, arrested and re-sentenced for violating probation.
Hook up with a co-writer, take photos in bookish yet au courant plastic-rimmed glasses and upon release from your second prison term, voilà, you're an author.
Sound crazy? It worked for one local rapper, actor, designer, philanthropist ... turned novelist.
"Power & Beauty: a love story of life on the streets," by Tip "T.I" Harris with David Ritz (William Morrow, $23.99) debuts in bookstores today.
Set on the streets of Atlanta, the book features an adoptive brother and sister, named Power and Beauty, who struggle to deal with their mother's death (his biological and her adoptive). You kind of know where it's headed when they have grief-sex the night moms was killed in an explosion at the disco where she did the bookkeeping.
Slim, the hustler who employed their mom, throws a lavish funeral, takes the kids into his enormo Cascade Heights home, and proceeds to show Power the path of the less righteous while trying to put the moves on Beauty. Happy 16th birthday! (to both of them).
But hey, this is a crazy, mixed up Atlanta anyway. One where Ted Turner, Walt Frazier and Andrew Young frequent the same jazz club as street thugs and where the cool kids in high school wear Akoo clothing (that would be T.I.'s clothing line).
Power and Beauty quickly go their separate ways as he gets sucked into Slim's underworld and she runs across the country to avoid it. But they can't stop thinking about each other, and surely fate will bring them back together.
It may still be hard out here for a pimp, but as T.I. tells it, life's no peach for a Power and a Beauty either.
