Journal: 05/13/06

Mother’s Day approaches tomorrow and I have the day (Sunday) off again. Expect a lengthy post tomorrow as I write my way through the first holiday Joann, Bill and I celebrated in Snug Harbor. Maybe next week will be the seven-day long one that I thought this one would be. I asked the managers if they wanted my to just keep Sunday as my day off, but they said that this was just an exception and things would be back to normal next week. We’ll see.

Thinking About the Next Book

One of the top promises I made to Joann before she died was to finish one of my books. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do in that respect and I believe I’m finally there.

I have always been great at starting to write new books, I’ve written four, fifty-thousand word stories that all need to be edited into saleable books, but never went far beyond the initial effort. Every November, for the last four years, I have competed in the National Novel Writing Month competition to produce these four stories that never were completed. The plots are good, the ideas fresh, reflecting life in the motels I’ve lived and worked in. Basically, your "underdog does good" story, dealing with the issues of the working homeless and the traps they are prey to.

After Joann passed on, I thought I wanted to write something that followed, to some degree, the path of this blog. I felt then, and still do now, that not enough is said about the intensely personal experience of personally taking care of a dying spouse or child. Especially about the aftermath for those who must continue on and deal with whatever their new lives hold. After taking Joann through the home hospice experience, I believe I’m well qualified to put that experience out into the world. And, I have just the vehicle to do it.

One of the stories I wrote was called "The View from Snug Harbor," and is the story of Joann, Bill and I and how we lived in the original apartment in this motel. The idea I have is to take this blog-line and overlay it onto the Snug Harbor story, using these blog entries as the book’s chapters and matching the pieces of the original novel to each Snug Harbor chapter as a flashback. By intertwining these two stories and not randomizing them chronologically, I believe that this would produce a powerful way to tell the story of all three of us, past and present, simultaneously.

I’m excited about the idea and now that I have it firmly in my head, will start working on the outline and selecting the chapters to use. Not only will this be a tribute to Joann, but also I’ll finally produce a marketable novel.