Journal: 05/31/06

After yesterday’s decision to find a second job, today I feel more at peace with myself. At least I have a direction to go in instead of sitting around wondering what to do next. The answer was obvious to any outsider, but it took me a long time to give up my pride and submit to the demands of fiscal reality. I know I can’t keep begging off the people I know, as limited a group as that is, and I have to start picking up some of the slack Joann left when she died. Although, Rose did bring me a couple of packs of cigarettes today so I won’t have to face that hurdle until Saturday.

Leaping Into the Writerly Life

In my newfound spirit of "direction," I finally settled on an approach to finishing one of my erstwhile books. I decided that my idea of combining the unedited book "The View from Snug Harbor" with the events in this blog is especially viable because Snug Harbor covers exactly the same period in time as the "flashback" pieces would if I turned About Dying into a book. At the moment, I still think that writing a book attached to an active blog is a great idea. Add to that the fact that both of the important pieces, the novel and the blog, are already written but need to be combined and intensely edited, this becomes an eminently workable idea.

This book idea is something I’ve been tossing around for some time without any real idea of where to start. However, it comes to me that the first step is to take all of the blog postings, which I have in MS Word format, one post per file, and combine them, top-down, oldest post to newest, into one new document. This new document, tentatively called "About Dying: The Complete Blog" would serve as the outline to the new book. From there, it is just a matter of cutting up Snug Harbor into the appropriate pieces and marrying them to events in the blogline. (Did I just coin a new term? Blogline: a web log used as an outline?).

The combined blog may have some other uses also. I could give it out to friends and relatives, or sell copies to those who want to read the blog from the top down. That’s for another time though.

This is something I can be very impassioned about doing. I’ve wanted to do something to memorialize Joann ever since she passed away and I can’t think of a better way to do it than by putting her battle into novel form. She and I had always thought that the blog would be for others to learn from as well as promoting my own sanity after she left the world. Right now might be just the time to make that happen. It’s a beautiful story anyway.