Writing is not an even process...

Well, that declaration is nothing new. I have struggled with a regular writing schedule for a month now. That's nothing new either. It has to do with writers needing to do something else to make a living... which is just sad. I mean, there are the lucky few, but most of us struggle along trying to do creative writing at the edges of all the things we need to do to pay our bills, right?

There are many unkind realities of the U.S. culture, and this is one of them.

Okay, but the other thing is getting to this point in the book-writing where I had to clarify for myself once again what this really is. I think I let too much come in from outside to steer me off course at times.

Part of this is my own difficulty in naming the genre (why does this culture so insist on putting things in easy-to-relate-to boxes?). I keep calling it my more-than-memoir, but the use of that genre word has tended to have others put the book in a genre-box, or for my critique group to sometimes expect something from it that was not my real intention.

Revisions, revisions, revisions

It's a lot like life, isn't it? And sometimes just as tedious.

Okay, I have abandoned this blog for a couple weeks. I was in Manhattan for more than half of May, personal reasons, and only managed that one post on May 17. I don't know why it was so hard to write in this blog space because Manhattan inspires a lot for a writer. I think too much input made it hard to reflect in a way that gives way to an essay or a poem.

But it did give me time for revisions...

The prologue and chapter four of the multi-generational memoir needed revising, not just the little ones, the bigger ones. Reading through the manuscript after the first set of revisions, the energy just kind of died in several pages of chapter four, so that's what I took with me to New York. Now I have to read through it again.

And again.

At some point, one has to let it go.