Back to the drawing board

Had to readjust my New Year's Resolutions a bit. I decided to re-write my entire first memoir....all twenty two chapters. Based on lots of good feedback from agents, I radically changed the format of the first six chapters and carefully crafted some of the chapters. This, of course, has left my new memoir sitting on a corner of my desk, but at least I'm writing....lots, and every day. And, I have continued to write articles, and keep up my four blogs and the one for the Louisville Bed and Breakfast Association.

My focus, in the re-write, was on going deeper with my story, especially in terms of the narrator and how she changed over time. I also tried to emphasize and develop some of the conflict that arose between her and other characters. I've had to look at this work as you would a work of fiction and make sure all the major parts; such as, character development, dialogue, plot, story arc, etc are well crafted. This is no easy task, especially for a memoirist who isn't used to applying fictive techniques.

Anyhow, I will be back to my second memoir soon. I first want to send out more queries on the re-write. I only sent it to a small group the first time. I got good feed-back and a lot of good suggestions for making the work better.  Thanks to all the agents who were so positive. It gave me hope.


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Valuable info gleaned from editor Brook Warner

In the first two sections of her radio broadcast, Brook talked about how we sabotage ourselves so that we keep ourselves from going forward with the writing and the publishing processes.

The second section was on how we use time to get out of doing what we should be doing to finish our manuscripts and move on. She offered a way of scheduling time in such a way that we create windows of time in which we can write on a regular basis.

I do not have a problem with either of the above.. I'm pretty disciplined when it comes to writing. The problem I have now is re-writing my entire manuscript from the beginning. I'm at the point where I am doing nitty gritty crafting. It takes so much more time than the initial creative phase where everything is flowing onto the page. I've written a query and a proposal. They are both in the oven and from time to time I go a take another look and maybe do a little expansion or revising.

In the meantime, I'm still reading a lot of memoir to stay in the narrative mode. I do have a pretty good platform including 5 blogs, several online mags I write for, several social networks, a website for my B&B, and a 17-year list of customers who have frequented my bed and breakfasts. My memoir is about the 17 years I was an Innkeeper.

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