Again I am at the keys. The urge to write, if that is the right word, is like a gathering of clouds, silky and serene high above. Thoughts flutter about in my mind, Jordan, my son, Jane, her son Lewis coming in tonight from college. l know that within a few minutes a thread will appear to awareness and I will begin blathering. In the meanwhile I discuss the process as I experience it. Each of us does it differently. I feel as if my mind is magnetic and I am about to draw in pins. Here I go: “Cameras as Remembrances of Things Past,” which won a contest at Subltetea, was touched up and sent out to a magazine that publishes personal essays. I am about to work on the rough sketches of a few Holocaust stories so that I can improve them and submit to magazines to see if they have good bones. I finally broke through a personal resistance and began to collect and type out quotations about The i Tetralogy to be inserted into the front pages of the pending second edition of the book. Resistance is a phenomenon, and as a therapist I experienced it all the time. The rule of thumb is that you meet resistance from the first moment the client shows up. And when I was up on the literature, I learned that one of the better tacts to handle this was to join the resistance and not fight it. And that is how I handle my own resistances. I just wait until the glacier calves and I can see a way through the ice.
The cover has several swastikas on it crushing and breaking a red Jewish star. For some it is too much. Well, I am too much, and the Holocaust is too much. However, my son has asked to try another cover and quite frankly I have come across one woman who said she would not read the cover because it was emblazoned in such a fashion. She truly judged the book by its cover, and her dramatic loss. We agreed that railroad tracks might make a good cover for in many books trains are viewed as the symbol of the Holocaust. The beauty of POD is that you can, for a fee, dramatically change everything in the book. So one or two minor errors redone, new blurbs on the back cover, deleting the introduction which has not worked, and changing the cover as well as an opening series of pages that say: Praise for The i Tetralogy will be the second edition. I will offer that version for reviews once more and see what happens. I have gathered a small database of reviewers and bloggers interested in my work. I’ll start here. And while you are reading this, the tetralogy is available for review if you are so inclined.
And so the mental locomotive is gathering up steam, for I write and am moved cyclically by my literary efforts. You cannot expedite me, I bristle and grrrrr. While these fronts have opened up I launch another front. I will work on Sojourner once more. It has lain revised but fallow for a few months. Jane has a few corrections she wishes me to make and I will comply for she is an excellent reader. It was my first completed novel written in the eighties and it is good, even better now. So maybe three books within four years, not bad at all. I interrupted this blog to have dinner and dinner has satisfied me so that writing has receded, the energy dissipated. I bid you adieu.
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