The new book is about half done. The first ten chapters and the last three are written, so I know how it starts and I know where it goes. Weird, but now all I have to do is draw the map between them.<\/p>\n
To wrap it up, I pulled a phrase I\u2019d uttered many miles ago to a someone I\u2019d just met. \u201cI\u2019m not ready to let you go.\u201d Later, she and I used that moment often as a reference point for how it all began.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, I shared with her I\u2019d used the seminal sentence, even though she and I have been through so much since then.<\/p>\n
\u201cI notice you put a lot of your own life into your writing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hoped to make you smile,\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am smiling,\u201d she said. I could tell from her tone it was true.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to give the reader that same sense of hope, vulnerability. In the book it\u2019s different in degree than when I first said it, but the same in what it meant.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHmm,\u201d she said, or something similar.<\/p>\n
A couple of months ago, on our last trip over the mountain, she was engrossed looking at photos she\u2019d taken on her phone of places we\u2019d traveled. \u201cIt\u2019s all about making memories,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I wanted to say, look at the snow in the trees, wet leaves on black pavement, take my hand in yours, make this a memory! Be with me! But I just drove, knowing that grasping harder would squeeze the remaining life out of what we had, not knowing how to keep her from slipping away.<\/p>\n
So I put words I\u2019ve heard and words I\u2019ve said and wanted to say into the mouths of characters in a novel half finished. It\u2019s a complete fiction woven of moments some of which are real, by a writer trying to make sense of what is and what\u2019s not, using memories to create something that never happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The new book is about half done. The first ten chapters and the last three are written, so I know how it starts and I know where it goes. Weird, but now all I have to do is draw the map between them.<\/p>\n
To wrap it up, I pulled a phrase I\u2019d uttered many miles ago to a someone I\u2019d just met. \u201cI\u2019m not ready to let you go.\u201d Later, she and I used that moment often as a reference point for how it all began.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, I shared with her I\u2019d used the seminal sentence, even though she and \u2026 Read more\u2026