Checking back in, lest you forget us

Hello everyone: I am unable (yet) to post my last road trip blog but I'll try again this week. But let me assure you that our road trip was so important that we won't stop talking to you about it. Kathy has written some lovely pieces. Her connection to Marc was all there. She's just back from a woodturning symposium and is very excited about all that she learned. I stayed home and cleaned and cleaned, plus acted as a foil for the needs of B.C., our 20 year old cat who runs the place.

My book is at a new stage. The novel is on bake, with me adding very little but thinking about it a lot. I've finished the writing, or at least I think I have, and have a novel-length piece of writing. When I started writing, I had the setting and time - a housing project in the early 1960's. When I was 11, my mother, who was having a very hard time, drove 500 miles away from our middle class neighborhood, taking my two brothers and me to live in a housing project. We were there for one year and it was one of the most interesting years of my life. I was face to face with poverty, oppression, racism and a very ill mother. I fictionalized what happened (it truly is not The True Story) and wrote a novel.

When I was in school and writing, one of my writing teachers talked about the choices that writers make. I have always been extremely curious about the novel writing process. What's the deal about making choices? What problems of writing? A story is a story and then you end it. Only someone who is on the edge of writing one of these things would let herself think that. It has been a complex process, one with lots of deletions. The story as it now stands is not at all the way I started it. So much has dropped out. So much has dropped out that was very useful, including an extremely ironic tone. Gone.

It sounds as though the process to secure a literary agent, should I attempt to publish, is difficult. I'm pretty curious about it. Has anyone out there published a novel?

There are some situations to keep quiet about and there are some situations to make a lot of noise about. My year in the housing project is something to make noise about, and that's what my writing is. There was such oppression in the project, and such depression and remember that these were the days before self-esteem building workshops. There are things I saw that I could not work into the novel, by the way. One of those is my young shock at attending a movie, non-Walt Disney, at the Boy's Club. We each had to pay 10 cents to see it, and that meant a host of children could not go. It was a very hot night (we must have just arrived in the project) and we sat on the floor, one hundred of us or so, watching what I considered an extremely old-fashioned movie. No popcorn or candy available. It opened with a child being kidnapped on a hot summer day, yelling and screaming as he's shoved into a car, while adults walk by and smile and wave. Perhaps the kids watching the movie could relate.

Take a look at this link to see a Seattle housing project, circa early 1960's:

http://www.seattlehousing.org/CommunitySites/newhollycommunity/HistoryofNewHolly/HollyParkBefore.htm