From Manuscript to Book!

It's on the way! My manuscript, There Is No Future In The Past: A Travel Memoir, has been sent from my computer to be formatted for printing.

It has been a long journey for this book. It began as illustrative inserts in an earlier book that was always a bridesmaid and never a bride. Although it was some solace to get rave letters from publishers about my writing (in a day in which many book proposals are not even acknowledged as having been received), the "it doesn't fit our publishing projections for the year" or "we can't market it adequately"  meant it was writing no one would ever read. I finally stashed the manuscript in the back of the closet, because over time it ceased being relevant.

But thanks to today's computer software, which beats typewriters and yellow pads all hollow, I copied those illustrative inserts into another file. They seemed too good to waste. I began playing around with the paragraphs, having a good time with no goal as to whether any of them were publishable.The next stage was some travel essays that I thought might have something to say.

At the same time, I began hanging around with a group of writers interested in memoir. They had been together for a week with Catherine Watson, a travel writer, through the Split Rock Arts Program administered by the University of Minnesota. They are a wonderful, supportive group, who have helped me immensely in my development as a writer. However, memoir was a genre I never intended to write. As far as I was concerned, too many "confessional memoirs" had given the genre a bad name.

There is an old adage about being careful who you hang out with. My travel essays became more personal and revealing. Gradually, they morphed into a manuscript I never planned to write. So much for believing we know where we are going.

I grew up on the "flattest place on earth," as the farmland of the Red River Valley of the North is sometimes called. It was a time when conformity and proper roles took precedenceover everything else, combined with a religiously conservative community that preferred its isolation from the rest of the world . Needless to say, if I had been choosing a place to grow up, this place was not a good fit! When I graduated from college and my family could no longer dictate who I was supposed to be, I fled. My newly-minted husband and I went east to Washington DC - and would have gone further east if it wouldn't have meant falling off the edge of the continent into the sea. Life was never the same!

Hopefully, I will be able to hold this new book in my hands by mid-April. There is something magic about this holding concrete and tangible results of one's writing.  A sense of satisfaction, closure, new life for words spread out on pages over time. It won't be the last book I write. But for the moment, time will stand still and I will honor what has been born.

And then the sales and the marketing and all the rest that goes with insuring what I have written will be held by a multitude of hands. What a journey it has been!


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