(April 7, 2023)

Since I last wrote, Richard and I continued working on our revisions to the script for Weaving Penelope based on all the wonderful feedback we got last year from our actors and audiences involved with the workshop staged readings. We finished the revisions plus all the supplemental materials that would be included with the script (notes to directors, historical references, pronunciation guides, etc.) by the end of February.

We are really pleased with the script and the changes we’ve made, and in early March, we officially submitted it to one small liberal arts university with a terrific theatre program in hopes they will be interested in the possibility of including a full production in a future season in the next couple of years. We have also compiled a list of various other places to submit the script for possible production (other college programs, contests, theatre companies known for producing new work, etc.), so if we hear from the first university that they are unable to do the show, we will already have a backup plan in place. This means the project officially goes on the back burner for a while, and it becomes a waiting game until we hear back about that first proposal.

March was a transition month for me, and I spent it going back through the manuscript for my new memoir, That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. I wanted to give it one last look to eliminate any awkward phrases or misspellings I might have missed, so it can be in the best possible shape when it goes to the Sunbury editorial staff. As I went through the manuscript again, I was looking for places to add photo illustrations.

I expect most peoplewouldn’t necessarily think of a grief story as the kind of thing that would have illustrations, but so much of our life together had been photographed that I decided to add some images. So, as I went back through the manuscript, I made notes about photos that could enhance each part of the story and make it more personal. I shared a few last time and wanted to do the same this month as I wait for formal editing to begin

The photos I shared before were mostly of Skip with our grandkids. This time, I’ll focus on some of our trips together. He was a wonderful travel companion, and I called him my “geezer model,” thanks to his willingness to be my photo subject whenever we were on the road.

Our first trip together was a long weekend to Quebec City in 2005. It was our first romantic getaway after becoming a couple. Fellow tourists did us the favor of taking our photo, and we took theirs, too. We were all enjoying the view of the old city with the St. Lawrence River in the distance, from an area around La Citadelle du Québec, which was just a short walk from our hotel.

A year later, while I was on an earned leave from teaching, we took a seven-week drive across Canada, down the west coast of the US (with a stop in Oregon to see friends and family), then into numerous native and national parks in the SW, and eventually headed home across the central US. Skip enjoyed getting to know my brother better when we made our stop in Oregon.

We also had one delightful European adventure in 2008 to visit friends and family abroad and do a bit of sightseeing while we were at it. We started in England where Skip had a cousin, then to France to visit two of my close childhood friends, then to Ireland to meet up with our neighbor and good friend who was renting a house in Dingle for a month. Of course, we couldn’t go to England and not stop to visit Stonehenge.

Whenever possible, Skip went along to my academic conferences and special speaking appearances. In the spring of 2009, he accompanied me to Arlington, VA, for a talk I was invited to give on women stage directors at the Shirlington Public Library. While in the area, we visited many of the monuments and memorials on the mall in Washington, DC. Skip had a high school friend who had been killed in Viet Nam, and he was able to find his name on the Veterans Memorial Wall.

Before I close this newsletter, here’s my exciting news! Last year, I decided to enter Keeping the Lights on for Ike in the “Legacy” category (published more than two years ago) for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Last month, I got word that my 2019 book was a finalist for their special da Vinci prize for cover design. My parents deserve recognition as well because it was Dad’s photography and Mom’s scrapbook where she kept that last letter to him during WWII that inspired the cover designer to put them together. The prize itself will be awarded later this spring, but I can officially claim finalist status and use their special seal in my publicity materials for the book from this point forward.

Next time I write, I hope to have a release date for the new grief memoir and be close to the end of the editing and book design phase for That Day, And What Came After.

(January 3, 2023)

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you are looking forward to 2023 as much as I am. In my October blog prior to the holidays, I told you that even though I didn’t yet have a specific commitment from the publisher, there was every reason to believe that my newest book would be published soon. I’m now delighted to report that my newest book, a grief memoir called That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years, has officially been scheduled by my publisher to start the work of editing and design in the second quarter of 2023, which means we’ll get underway in April or May. The last time my editing/design happened in the spring, the book came out in the fall, so I’m presuming this one will be on a similar schedule. So, in addition to the holidays, I was able to celebrate the formal acceptance of my third book with Sunbury Press.

This image was taken the day before the first performance of Weaving Penelope in Oregon and before the good news about the memoir, but it’s the best celebratory photo I’ve taken in ages!

As I mentioned last time, now I will start making some very specific choices for possible illustrations for the book. I know for sure that I will use these photos. The first is the last photo I ever took of Skip, just three days before his death. It was not a happy morning that day because some drunk students had walked by the previous night, presumably on their way home from the bar to their nearby campus (not the university where I was teaching), and one lunkhead thought it might be funny to toss our full recycling bin (on the curb awaiting early morning pickup) through the back window of our car parked in the driveway. Pointless and opportunistic vandalism, pure and simple.

The pictures of the car were originally for insurance purposes, but I’m glad I included him in the frame of one of the photos I took that morning.

Another photo I know I will include is of Skip during our last vacation, just two months before his death. He loved the area around York Harbor, Maine, a place he had gone often throughout his life and was happy to share with me for the first time. And he love, love, loved being on the water. During that vacation, we took three boat trips in just two days out of Perkins Cove: a lobster boat demo tour, a large racing sloop that took us out onto the ocean some distance from shore, and a small sailboat with only us, the captain, and a handful of other passengers, where we heard the latest story about George Bush, Senior, who had recently grounded his boat in front of his Kennebunkport home, which resulted in his secret service detail taking over piloting when the boats got close to land from that point on.

It’s easy to see that being on the water brought Skip great pleasure.

And I’m sure I will include photos of Skip and Maren, his first grandchild. The two of them had a very special sympatico from the moment they laid eyes on each other. Though she was only 3 ½ years old when her “Papa” died, and though they didn’t have a habit of phone conversations while he was living, she continued to talk with him on her plastic phone with a direct line to Heaven for many weeks after he disappeared from her day to day life.

Top photo is from our summer visit in June 2009.

The second is from March 2010 – I suspect she got that phone for Christmas the previous year.

And the second grandchild came just five months before Skip’s sudden death. He doted on that little boy and was looking forward to watching him grow up and teaching him how to play baseball and to be a Red Sox fan. I’m sure he would have been just as devoted to Trenton as he was to Maren, though he never got the chance.

Skip looks both delighted and exhausted. I’m sure he worried about his daughter’s second labor all night before we were able to head to the hospital bright and early in the morning to meet the new arrival.

As I wait for the official editing process to start, I’m still participating regularly in my wonderful women writers’ group, which means that I’m scheduled to present new work every few weeks for the next three months. So, I continue to work on more essays that might become part of a future Mosaic Memoir, even though I have no idea whether they will cohere as a book project or exist as separate essays in the long run. Right now, I’m writing about a series of psychic readings I had in the late 1980s when I was in my mid-to-late 30s and involved in the first serious relationship after my divorce from my first husband. It’s fascinating to me to reflect on those readings and the young woman I was 30 years ago, and I hope I can make it interesting to potential readers as well.

As if that wasn’t enough for me to do in early 2023, Richard and I continue to refine our script for Weaving Penelope in hopes of finding somewhere for a full production in the reasonable near future. We’re almost done!

(October 5, 2022)

The end of summer and early autumn has been an incredibly busy time for me this year. Earlier this summer, I wrote to you about a play I’d been working on for years, Weaving Penelope, which is the story of the wife of Odysseus and what she did for 20 years while her husband was off having his eponymous adventures. The play alternates between storytelling choral scenes (in the style of Greek theatre, using voice, music, movement, and ritual) with more realistic character interaction scenes. I’m delighted to report that—unlike the Massachusetts workshop which was derailed by Covid just days before the scheduled showcase last June—the Oregon workshop showcase happened as scheduled, thanks to the sponsorship of Keizer Homegrown Theatre (who gave us rehearsal and performance space on their outdoor patio) and Ronni Lacroute (who generously funded stipends for the artists and covered production incidentals for both workshops).

The Oregon cast (only half the number needed for a full production) did heroic work presenting an “enhanced stage reading” to an invited audience. My co-playwright, Richard Carp, unexpectedly ended up directing the Oregon workshop due to serious medical challenges experienced by the original director. He got first-hand experience working with his own script as director, while I observed his rehearsals in the week before the showcase performance, keeping track of any script changes. Both our experiences were quite useful for continuing script development. Though we solicited actor feedback from both casts, he and I were also able to experience audience responses directly and got terrific constructive feedback from those who attended the talkbacks after each showcase performance. We are working on one more revision that we hope to complete before the holidays. Our next goal will be to secure a full production somewhere in 2023 or 2024, perhaps in a university setting or in a pro/semi-pro theatre company somewhere.

Before going out to Oregon for the last week of rehearsals and the workshop showcase, I submitted the manuscript of what I am calling my “grief memoir,” called That Day, And What Came After. to my publisher Here is a brief book description that I sent with the manuscript:

What if you came home one day and found your husband dead in his favorite chair? This grief memoir explores the author’s experience of the unexpected death of her husband from sudden cardiac arrest a mere three months after his doctors had pronounced him hale and healthy. The author shares details of the couple’s later-in-life courtship and marriage as well as other experiences she has had along the grieving road in the years since becoming a widow.

In our society, we often don’t want to talk or even think about death, so stereotypes about widows exist. However, each person’s grief journey is unique, and sharing tales of those experiences can be helpful and useful for those who find themselves in a similar situation. Though not a self-help book, this memoir is the story of a widow who defied the stereotype that widows are expected to “get over it” and move on with their quiet lives. Instead, this widow “got through it” and is now sharing her journey in hopes of helping others in comparable circumstances.

Though I don’t officially have a contract or a publication target date yet, I’ve been told by someone in the know in the publisher’s office that it’s very rare for them to decide not to publish a second (or in my case a third) book from an author they’ve published in the past. So, I’m hoping I’ll be able to share much more specific good news in the future. Now I need to start making some choices for possible illustrations for the book. I have tons of photos of Skip, who was very photogenic, so the task will be to find the ones that will help illuminate our story together.

What am I working on next, you ask? That’s a very big question at the moment. I have no concrete ideas for a new book, and I’ve been writing short essays in the meantime, just to keep my creative juices flowing. I identify those essays as part of my Mosaic Memoir, but I have no idea whether they will cohere as a book project or simply live as separate essays. My next concrete writing task, however, is to start working on the “matter” (details and insights that will become useful for publicity and marketing once the book is published), so I’ll be ready when Sunbury gives me a publication date and assigns an editor.

(July 4, 2022)

Since I last wrote in early March about the virtual book tour I’d just completed for Finding Sisters, lots has been happening for me on the writing front. The first news is that the audiobook version of Keeping the Lights on for Ike finally came out last month! Though the initial recordings were completed in November of 2020, various complications, including a shift in personnel dealing with the project, a few technical glitches, and some general lack of communication between Amazon and Sunbury during the pandemic slowed things down, but as of June 9^th, the Audible version of Keeping the Lights on for Ike, read by yours truly, is now on sale. There will also be an audiobook version of Finding Sisters, but Sunbury has now engaged a new company to coordinate their audiobooks, so it won’t be read by me (in spite of the fact that I did voiceover work back in the day when I was still occasionally working as an actor), but I’ll be sure to let everyone know when that one comes out as well.

In May and June, I spent most of my time focusing on a playwriting project that has been on my radar for many years. Weaving Penelope, written with my old friend and theatre colleague, Richard Carp, is a play exploring the mostly untold story about the wife of Odysseus, who ruled her husband’s kingdom while he was away fighting the Trojan War—and having other adventures—for 20 years. It imagines Penelope’s experiences and expands on scenes from Homer’s Odyssey. The play nods to some Greek theatre conventions, including the use of a chorus of players who narrate the story and out of which all characters—except Penelope—emerge. Richard and I had been working on the play for well over a decade, only completing it once we had both retired from teaching and academic administration. We had a very successful Zoom reading in the spring of 2021 with participants in four states, and in 2022, thanks to the sponsorship of Keizer Homegrown Theatre (KHT) who gave us a fiscal umbrella and an Oregon theatre facility to use, and the generous patronage of Ronni Lacroute (supporter of the arts extraordinaire), we scheduled two in-person workshops with directors and actors to further explore the play on its feet: one outdoors at a private residence in western Massachusetts in June and another at the KHT courtyard performance space in September. Unfortunately, in spite of all our careful rehearsal protocols and regular testing, Covid—plus a death in the family of another cast member—cancelled our showcase performance in Massachusetts. Though we weren’t able to get audience reaction to a performance, we were able to get some very valuable feedback about working with the script from the actors in the ensemble, and we are doing some minor adjustments to the script this summer, before rehearsals begin for the coming Oregon showcase.

In the middle of all this other excitement, I have been working slowly but surely on my grief memoir. I started writing it in 2017 (seven years after my husband’s sudden death but the first time I could articulate coherent thoughts about what I wanted/needed to say about that event and the effect it has had on my life), and the manuscript, called That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years, is almost ready to propose to my publisher. The narrative starts with the day Skip died, takes the reader through the first month of my widowhood, including his funeral, burial, a memorial event at our house, and my struggle to find a new path for my life, and then jumps back to the beginning of our relationship and details the life we were building together after our late-in-life marriage. In addition to the more traditional relationship narrative, I had also written several short essays about particular challenges I encountered “Along the Grieving Road” and curated some of the entries in my grief journal to share with readers. Every word of this memoir has been shared over the past several years with my wonderful women writers’ group, and they have given me some terrific advice on the text, which has now been revised several times. This spring, the big challenge for me was to find a structure for the memoir that would allow me to include all these disparate parts in a single, coherent whole. Thanks to my former employer, St. Lawrence University, and their generous research support for emeritus faculty, I was able to hire the professional editor who facilitates the writing group and already knew the work to work with me directly on structural issues. Now I’m in the process of reworking some of the shorter pieces and the journal selections and hope to finish the final manuscript before summer is over.

Though Sunbury Press has already published two of my books, they do not automatically accept new work from their authors without vetting each manuscript, so I will be going through an application process, just as I did with Keeping the Lights on for Ike and Finding Sisters. I hope to be ready to start that process in August. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

(March 1, 2022)

It’s been five months since I last wrote, and a lot has happened in that time. Here’s the quick rundown. Finding Sisters was released by Sunbury Press on September 14, 2021. I participated in an in-person multiple local author event at the Greenfield YMCA on October 2^nd to promote the new book (even though I didn’t actually have any copies on hand yet) and gave a radio interview to North Country Public Radio in Canton, NY (where the journey started) on October 27^th. Then the holidays rolled in, and the holidays rolled out again while not much else happened on the book front. Just two days before Christmas, while taking out my paper recycling, I took a dramatic fall on icy stairs which resulted in bruises, muscle pulls, and 18 stitches in my leg. Blessedly, there were no broken bones, but it did create a big slowdown where my plans for late December and early January were concerned. I’m much better now.

Shortly after the start of 2022, I began a virtual tour (20 “stops” with various book bloggers featuring my new book between January 3 and February 25), experienced my first Facebook Live interview on January 16^th with a book blogger in India, and had my first masked in-person author talk/reading/book sale on January 26^th at the Greenfield Senior Center.

Anyone who is not one of my Facebook friends and has not already seen each stop on the virtual tour as they unfolded over time can binge the tour stops here.

The page starts by sharing my interview with the tour host and other details about me and the book. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the tour schedule with related links. There is one link (January 20^th) that didn’t feature me or my book because of an unexpected medical crisis for the blogger (not COVID); otherwise each stop on the tour has a link to that blogger’s review of Finding Sisters (all of them excellent) and sometimes additional info requested by the hosts (guest posts, interviews, excerpts from the book).

I’ve also taken time to update my website, so if you’re not interested in bingeing the tour stop by stop, you can get most of the same information about the new book on my website, especially at the links for “Reviews” and “Interviews about Finding Sisters.”

If you haven’t already purchased a copy of Finding Sisters, you can enter a giveaway that will be running on Goodreads during the month of March. I’ll be giving away eight inscribed copies of the book to eight lucky winners, and it all starts today, March 1, 2022! To enter, you must have a Goodreads account, but they are free and easy to set up. The easiest way to enter the giveaway is to go to the Finding Sisters page on Goodreads and use the “Enter Giveaway” button.

Be sure to scroll down the page a bit for the giveaway link. You must give your address if your entry is for a print book (mine is), so the author or publisher can send you the book if you are one of the winners. Then you agree to their terms (no purchase necessary) and say you’re not a robot. You will be notified by email if you are one of the winning entries (most authors usually give away multiple copies; I’m giving away eight signed copies)). If you are interested in other Goodreads Giveaways, go to the Goodreads homepage and click on the “Browse” dropdown. From there, click on “Giveaways” and “Recent” to scroll through all current giveaways.

If you want to guarantee getting an inscribed copy of the print book, you will need to order that from me directly (or contact me about how to mail me the copy you have already received from Sunbury, Amazon, or your local bookstore, which I will inscribe with a personal message, sign, and send back to you). And if you’ve already read the book and enjoyed it, I’d love to get a few more reviews on Goodreads and/or Amazon.

The last early spring update to share with you is that the letters Dad wrote home during WWII, letters and images that became the core of Keeping the Lights on for Ike, have now started the process of becoming part of the archives of the Veteran’s History Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The archivist who received them last week said, “it’s just as rich a correspondence collection as I’d hoped.” This means that others who want to know more about veterans’ experiences during WWII will have access to the primary documents, and the archive will also steer researchers perusing the letters to my book, if they are interested.

(September 12, 2021)

When I wrote my last blog in June, I really thought that after teasing you with covers I had rejected in the cover design process, I’d be able to send you an update and final cover preview in early August, but here we are in September instead. The delays have been for good reasons—Sunbury is working on many new releases for the fall and the book designer had lots of manuscripts to lay out—but also because of a change I instigated regarding my book. I had a meeting in late July with the marketing consultant from Sunbury to make some plans for pre- and early release marketing strategies, and he convinced me that I needed a more exciting and engaging subtitle for Finding Sisters, a subtitle that highlighted the story more immediately and used more descriptive catchphrases that might attract possible readers.  So, instead of the relatively dry and academic, “My Journey to Find Genealogical Relations Through DNA Testing,” after a few days of back-and-forth conversations, we settled on the much more active and engaging, “How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find her Birth Family.”

So, with a new subtitle there had to be a revision in the design before the front cover art could be revealed. A couple of miscommunications later, the new front cover design is finally ready to be revealed, though the back cover is still in the final stages of the design process. I’m excited by the quality of the artwork, and a number of folks who have previewed the design have said it would make them interested in checking out the inner contents of the book itself, so between the image and the new subtitle, I’m hoping lots of folks will be interested enough to pick up a copy and browse once it hits bookstore shelves.

The image, created by artist Alyssa Roth using mostly photos I provided, includes faces from several places in my genetic family tree superimposed over the silhouette of a large and striking tree on a hillside (a photo of her own Alyssa had). Of the photos I provided, one is a picture of my birth mother from her high school yearbook; another is a photo of my paternal grandmother provided by one of my new cousins, and another is an image of a maternal half-sister (now deceased) that I never got to meet because she died before I ever embarked on my genealogical journey, provided by my other maternal half-sister. I love how the cover image engages the viewer and hints at mystery but is actually based in real family relationships I was able to discover during my genetic genealogy journey.

The book is not quite ready for prime time yet since there are a few last editing and design tasks to complete before the official release, but it’s due out before the end of this month (pre-order info at the end of this post). Once it’s in print, shipping and delivery from the publisher typically takes about two weeks. It will eventually be available on Amazon as well, but I don’t have a date for that just yet. There will also be a Kindle edition soon, and eventually, an audiobook read by yours truly, hopefully before the end of the year. If you want a signed copy of the print book, you will need to order that from me directly (or mail me the copy you receive from Sunbury, Amazon, or your local bookstore, which I will sign and send back to you), but I won’t have my copies any sooner than anyone else…though I have just seen and approved the pdf file for the final print book design (everything between the covers), and it looks great!

Here’s the description of the book from the Sunbury Press pre-order site:

Where does she come from?

Who are her genetic parents?

Who is she?

Does she even want to know?

With almost no information of her genetic heritage, adoptee Rebecca Daniels follows limited clues and uses DNA testing, genealogical research, thoughtful letter writing, and a willingness to make awkward phone calls with strangers to finally find her birth parents.

But along the way, she finds much more.

Two half-sisters.

A slew of cousins on both sides.

A family waiting to be discovered.

With the assistance of a distant cousin in Sweden and several other DNA angels on the internet, Daniels finally comes face to face with her birth mother just months before her passing. Join in on this author’s discovery of family and self in Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find her Birth Family

“Finding Sisters is an excellent example of what it takes to solve a family mystery. Yet it’s also a captivating story of human relationships in the age of secrecy-revealing DNA databases…. Refreshingly honest and personal. Like no other DNA success story, Finding Sisters uses footnotes and family tree diagrams to show exactly how the search unfolds. This makes the book a clever hybrid of a memoir and a case study” – Richard Hill, author of Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

The book is now available for pre-order here.

(June 3, 2021)

Two months ago, when I last wrote, the editing process for Finding Sisters had just begun with the assignment of the publishing company CEO as my editor. He sent me the first two chapters right away, followed by an alarming silence for several weeks. It turned out that he had been hospitalized with Covid, but he didn’t make that reality public, even for his authors, until he was well on the road to recovery. We’ve now finished the editing of the main manuscript which, lucky for me, didn’t involve much serious rewriting of any of the chapters, and the book has now moved on to the formatting stage.

The formatting stage is where the book designer takes the edited manuscript and the proposed illustrations and puts them together in what will eventually become the printing format for the physical book. That process began just about a week ago, so I have nothing to report about what’s happening there, but I’ve worked with this book designer before and she does excellent work. There were lots of illustrations for Keeping the Lights on for Ike, and she did a terrific job of placing them within the chapters. There are fewer illustration for Finding Sisters, so I’m not stressed at all about what she will come up with. Eventually, the appendix of resources and other items—like the dedication, acknowledgements, and table of contents—will get added to the format as well.

Along with the formatting of the book comes the cover design process. I’ve been assigned a designer, someone I’ve not worked with before but who is excited about the creative possibilities for this cover. She has already presented me with three interesting options to choose from, based on my early suggestions for possible cover artwork themes. The first, and favorite of all who have seen the options, is a tree image with faces from my illustrations superimposed inside the tree branches. It’s a really fascinating and creative take on a “family tree” and is very engaging for all who view it. She’s now in the process of playing with color variations and adjusting some of the photo images so we should be moving to finalize the design soon. The other two options presented below (designs by Alyssa Roth) included a playful wallpaper of a repeated double helix image (the structure of a DNA molecule) with lettering spread across it, and a closer view of a double helix with photo images inside the rounded, crossing strands and interspersed with lettering. Such wonderful and creative options for this author to choose from, and if these are the ones we’re not going to use, imagine how amazing the final cover will be! I look forward to unveiling the final cover design soon.

The marketing planning process for the book launch has also begun with me submitting all the requested info (about my in-person networks, social media handles, search keywords, comparable books by others, pitch ideas, blurbs, Amazon categories, etc.) to the marketing advisor. We’ll start that part of the process very soon. And you thought all you had to do to get a book published was to write it!

We are still very much on target for an early fall release, though it seems late summer could also be possible if all the details fall into place in a timely fashion. I’ll definitely keep everyone posted on that date as soon as it’s formally announced.

(March 29, 2021)

I had my “kickoff” meeting last Friday with Marianne Babcock (Executive Assistant to the CEO) about how Sunbury’s newly revised editing and planning process will unfold for Finding Sisters. We set a tentative date for publication in the early fall 2021, though it could be a bit earlier, depending on how the editing and book design process evolves. My latest revised manuscript was submitted to Marianne later that day, I gave her access to the proposed book illustrations through my Drop Box file, and I was told I would have an editor assigned very soon. It turns out that the Founder and CEO, Lawrence Knorr, is doing some occasional duty as an editor, and he’s going to be working with me. Lawrence has been supportive of this book since I first mentioned it to him as a work in progress during the podcast interview he did with me for Keeping the Light on for Ike when it was first released in early 2019. Genealogy is one of his particular interests, and it will be an incredible privilege to work directly with him!

Once the timeline was established, Marianne and I talked about the Matter template she had sent me in advance of the meeting. For those who have never published a book, “matter” is the term publishers use for all the information they need above and beyond the manuscript itself. Most of the information never shows up in the book itself, but it helps shape the marketing plan for the book as it approaches its launch and beyond. The template asks for a book description (both short and long form; very carefully defined by number of words or characters); author bio (short and long); BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) categories; SEO (search engine optimization) keywords; Amazon categories; and comparable books by other authors; all geared toward where the publisher can sell my book. The template also encourages social media participation by the author, an up-to-date author website, how to look for people to provide possible “blurbs” (those important mini-reviews from related professionals or other authors that help to raise interest in the book when it first comes out), and other ways the author can contribute to getting information out there about the book both before and after it’s released.

After talking about the matter document, which I am in the process of drafting now and which will come into play as the editing phase nears its end, we also talked about book illustrations. Finding Sisters will have a few photos (though not nearly as many as Keeping the Lights on for Ike) as well as some family trees I’ve created that are designed to help the reader follow all the familial connections discovered in the search for my genetic relations. I will be working with Crystal Devine, the same book designer who designed Keeping the Lights on for Ike, to determine the best placement of the illustrations. Those who know me well, know I have already thought carefully about that and, of course, provided a list (I am the queen of lists) for which chapters I think the pictures belong in and approximately where in that chapter the text reference to the photo happens, though the specifics are still to be determined collaboratively during the editing process.

(The photos above are the reunion images from the days I first met each of my new half sisters, April in the left image in 2015 and Ann on the right in 2017)

After the illustration conversation, we turned to talking a bit about ideas for the book cover. I think the most promising idea we discussed will be some kind of collage of the reunion photos and perhaps one or two of the family trees. Sunbury creates compelling cover artwork for their books, and I was quite pleased with the cover for Keeping the Lights on for Ike, so I have high hopes for the Finding Sisters cover as well. I don’t know yet who will design the cover for Finding Sisters, but Terry Kennedy who designed the cover for Ike is an excellent designer, and I’ve recently discovered that Lawrence is also an accomplished digital artist as well as editor and book publisher CEO, so it’s a win-win situation for me, regardless of which cover designer I am assigned.

I have no idea how long or short the editing and book design process will be now that it’s finally underway, but based on past experience it’s a solid bet it will be completed in plenty of time for an early fall book launch. However, between working on the newest book (not yet ready for a book proposal submission so I need to give it more attention) and the editing and marketing planning process for the Finding Sisters release, I have no idea whether I’ll be doing much new blogging until it’s finally published. But you can be sure I’ll keep you posted about the launch before it happens!

(January 19, 2021)

Last month, I promised to write a bit more about my “mosaic memoir” process, but first a quick update about editorial work on Finding Sisters. I’m still inching up the queue, and I’ve learned a lot about the process for the editorial staff at Sunbury Press. The “waiting to be assigned” queue isn’t necessarily a linear progression, as I had first imagined. Each editor works on multiple manuscripts of different lengths at any given time (some being assigned more projects than others, depending on their status as full or part time editors), and while Sunbury has a wide variety of imprints (from young adult fiction to literary and historical fiction to fantasy/horror to self-help books and more) as well as their primary focus on non-fiction manuscripts of all kinds, their editors do not seem to specialize in one genre of book over another. This means that the time needed to edit each manuscript can vary wildly. It’s also possible that occasionally the head of the company might pull a manuscript on a particularly “hot topic” (such as books related to the pandemic) out of the queue and advance it to the head of the line. Though there are still only a handful of books ahead of mine in the “to be assigned” queue, there’s really no way of telling when the editing process might start for me.

I’ll share that process with you when it happens, but it’s hard to know for sure when that might occur. So, in the meantime, I’ll explain more about the essays that make up what I was calling a “mosaic memoir” in my post last month. Due to a really interesting exercise suggested by the facilitator of my writing group, I discovered something surprising about those essays. The directive was to give a working title and subtitle to the projects (mostly memoirs) we were each working on, with the goal of telegraphing to our reading audience the main topic or theme of our manuscript in progress. In other words, “what’s my story about?” Members of the writing group shared our titles at our last Zoom meeting before our holiday hiatus.

The first step for me in preparing for the exercise was to list and characterize each of the 14 essays I’d drafted so far for the mosaic memoir project, and in doing so, I discovered that the essays were evenly split in type and that there was no way to give the current collection of essays a single title. There were actually two books in progress! Not only that, I was able to list several new essays/chapters that I want to write for each project. Exciting stuff.

The first thing I realized was that I had written more than I had realized about my late-in-life second marriage, including my husband’s unexpected death from sudden cardiac arrest just months after being pronounced totally healthy by his doctors. That has now become a different project for me. It will become a much more traditional memoir and, like the story in Finding Sisters, will cover a specific time in my life (2004-present). It will have anecdotal information that anyone on a similar grief journey might find useful, but it will not be a self-help book. Instead, it will be the story of those years in my life, my interactions with my husband, and the people and actions that helped me to survive and eventually even thrive again after his death. I’ve given it a working title of Adventures with the Bartender: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. For those who don’t know, my husband owned and ran a small Adirondack hotel for seven years and loved to serve drinks to guests in our house, especially when we had parties, thus earning himself the nickname “The Bartender” among our friends. He earned another nickname, “The Geezer Model,” because of his good-natured indulgence of me and my camera when I wanted to take his picture, which was often, especially when we were traveling.

For those who let me know after last month’s blog about their interest in the concept of the mosaic memoir, I want to reassure you that project is still very much a reality, though likely a lower priority at the moment than the new memoir about my widow journey. One close friend wrote me a note after learning about my mosaic memoir idea telling me she heartily approved and sharing information about an early 20^th century Italian poet, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), who famously said, “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” A former student who now teaches and performs internationally loved the idea of a mosaic memoir, and he explained to me, “Mosaic is my favorite content-process metaphor. In all my classrooms and performances, I always tell students/audiences: ‘Don’t look for a thread, we’re not following anything, keep your eyes in soft focus, the picture will begin to emerge eventually.’” And that’s exactly the point of this second project with the current working title, Mosaic Memoir: Snapshots of My Life. Though I have seven essays already written about various threads or snapshots that are important in my life, and at least four more I want to write, there’s no obvious narrative through-line. At least, not yet. These essays cover various times and experiences in my life and have current working titles like “Tomboy,” “Like Mother Like Daughter,” “Losing my Voice,” and “Brothers of the Heart” (with “Sisters of the Heart” soon to come), among others.

There’s certainly no lack of writing topics for me, and I’m sure these projects will keep me busy for many months to come. For anyone who worries that they might not have enough to say to write a memoir, I suggest you might try the mosaic approach. It’s amazing what comes up in one’s memory to write about when there’s no pressure to have a specific structural plan for a book!

For my next entry, I hope to be able to report on the start of my editing process for Finding Sisters, but I’m not holding my breath. In any case, I’m sure I’ll find something interesting to share with all of you about my two newest projects.

(December 1, 2020)

Due to several factors beyond my control, I continue to find myself “in the queue” at Sunbury to begin editing the new manuscript for publication, but my place in line has now moved from low double digits to the middle single digits, so perhaps my process will start before Christmas. Or not. It’s hard to predict, especially when you combine the holiday season with a pregnancy leave for a member of the editorial staff and a pandemic where the rules keep changing nearly every week. The editing and design work for the previous book took about five months from the beginning of the process to the book release, so I still expect Finding Sisters to come out in 2021, though I’ve stopped using “early 2021” in my projections.

In spite of a three-week hiatus in late September/early October where I couldn’t focus my eyes properly due to the healing process after laser eye surgery, I finished the files for the audiobook version of Keeping the Lights on for Ike in mid-November and submitted them for processing. However, they haven’t yet given me a date for the release of the audiobook. I’ll be sure to let you know when it happens, so anyone who’s been waiting to hear me read my WWII book out loud to you will finally be able to enjoy that experience. I realized as I was doing the work, just how amazing it was to read my own book out loud from start to finish. The book went through multiple revisions and had been read out loud, chapter by chapter, within my writing group before I started working with the Sunbury editors to get the book ready for publication. But the writing group readings happened over a longer period of time, with several weeks between each chapter, so there was no true sense of overall continuity. But reading a chapter a day really helps you understand whether or not your story hangs together and helps you more easily find repetitions and duplications. Even after as many revisions as the Ike manuscript went through in the nearly three-year process from early chapters to final publication, I was still able to notice a few small phrasing repetitions in this reading-aloud process that no amount of revisions managed to discover prior to publication. I doubt many will notice it, other than me, but I think it’s something I’ll try to do with any future book manuscripts before final publication, even if I’m not actively working on recording the audiobook version. It was a very interesting and revealing process.

So, other than waiting to be assigned my next editor, what else is happening for me? Both of my recent books had a very specific story to tell, but I didn’t feel like I had another lengthy and specific event-driven story to share when I finished Finding Sisters well over a year ago. Most of the women in my writing group have been working on memoirs of various kinds, so I started to think what that kind of me-focused story might mean. I knew I didn’t want to write a chronological “this is my life” story (boring!), and the most dramatic thing that had happened to me in the past couple of decades was the sudden death of my husband in 2010, which was very difficult to approach as a writer, especially because I worried that whatever I wrote might be maudlin and over-emotional. So, I started writing short essays about things of importance in my life to see if they might eventually hang together and add up to a larger story. I am calling this process my mosaic memoir, so each essay becomes a “tile” in the larger mosaic. Some are related to each other (the stories about my husband and his sudden death, for example), but others stand alone. In the spaces between working on larger projects (promoting Ike and recording the audiobook version, completing Finding Sisters, not to mention working actively with a theatre company for most of 2019), I started writing those essays throughout the past two years. At the moment, they number fourteen essays that could potentially become chapters in this mosaic memoir, and I have a list of at least seven other essays I still want to write. Four of them have had two drafts, and ten of them have had one critique from the writing group and are awaiting more work on a second draft. And then there are the seven new ideas on my list that await their first draft. Definitely plenty of work to keep me out of trouble in the coming year!

I hope all of you have found safe and comfortable ways to celebrate the 2020 holiday season. Next time, most likely in early 2021, I’ll write more about the mosaic memoir process. Hopefully by then, I’ll also be able to tell you a few things about the process of working with my editor on Finding Sisters.