I Finished My First Draft!

        I wrote the last sentence of my memoir, Posing for My Father, this weekend. I had wondered, when I started, how I would end it. John Irving says he knows the end of his story before he begins writing, and writes to the pre-determined end.

        I've written about my life for many years, but mostly in poems. In 2007 I decided to write a prose piece for Valley Writers Read in Fresno. They want half-hour length stories, which meant about fifteen pages. I chose to write about State Beach a unique one-block-long strip of sand in Santa Monica.  I had fun selecting music for the breaks.  When my dad listened to it, he said the music was too loud.

        The next year I wrote about a trip I took with my family when I was nine. I had my tenth birthday in Paris. This became "Europe on Five Dollars a Day" and was recorded in 2008. 

        The next year I took two poems I'd written and expanded them to tell the story of how my mom thought it would be fun to pretend to be strippers and do a dance for daddy, "because he photographed a stripper today."   The story is called "Daisies", which is what my mom pinned on a black velvet ribbon and tied around my six-year-old chest.  That piece aired in 2009.

        In 2010 my father died and my husband and I moved to Texas.  Having so much geographical distance from California gave me a new perspective on my upbringing and I decided to take those three pieces and expand them into a memoir that would end when I left L.A. for the first time, in 1970.

        I am not a "two-page-a-day" writer.  I write in spurts, usually about fifteen pages at a sitting.  The next day I edit what I've written. Then I may not write for a week.  I do research, re-reading my calendars and old letters, looking at pictures, looking things up on the internet.  I love that I live in a time when I can so easily fact check.  I hope this adds interest and dimension to my story. For even though I'm telling a story unique to my life, I know many people will remember where they were when, say, JFK was shot, the Watts Riots happened, or we heard about Charlie Mansion orchestrating the horrible Tate/LaBianca murders.

        Now long ago I went to a writing conference and met my neighbor who has also written a book. We decided to proof reach each other's manuscripts. Her book is a charming story of her parents' courtship in 1926. I'm enjoying it immensely.  But I'm only half-way through because it's over 600 pages.

        My book on the other hand is about 250 pages of text and will include another 100 pages of pictures, I hope.  I'm now trying to find an agent. Today I filled out my first query form, which I think is a terrific idea. It forced me to be succinct and think about why people would want to buy my book over all the others out there.

        This fall I'm offering an Adult Ed class called "Get it done!" about how to finish and submit and/or publish your book.  I should mention that I got my first book published when I was nineteen because my parents took photos to illustrate my poems.  Without the pictures and their connections at Crown Publishers it never would have happened.  I'm grateful to my parents for setting me on my path as a poet/writer. Each of my subsequent books was a very different experience.

        I'm looking forward to seeing my book through to publication, and I'm already thinking about the second part of my three-part autobiography. Many of the people I've loved are no longer on this planet. Writing about them is a way for me to spend time with them again remembering the happy, sad, scary, or weird experiences we had together.