Making A Plan

This started with me collecting the old books into one book called Fragments of a Life Revisited.

I was going to gather what I had already written, go through it, and try to make it fit together. Then I kept finding things I wanted to spend more time with.

Going back through the notebook has been part of that. There is something strange about reading what you wrote years ago while carrying everything you know now. I can remember a period of my life one way and then find the words I actually put on the page. They don’t answer every question. Sometimes they give me more questions.

The notebook is a record of what I wrote then. What I remember now is another part of the story. I want room for both.

The project has grown. Childhood has become a book I’m still discovering, with middle school beginning to take shape beyond it. There’s a house you can walk through, a neighborhood full of people I’m trying to remember accurately, and a boy making questionable decisions with a homemade parachute.

I threw the parachute up.
I sank like a stone.

Some experiments only need to be performed once.

Somewhere in all of this, I also decided: fuck Amazon.

I think they’re evil in plenty of ways, and I haven’t done any good selling books there. I don’t advertise them. I don’t put much work into trying to sell them through Amazon. I put them there, and then I go back to writing.

But I do work on this blog. In fits and spurts, certainly. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes I disappear for a while. Still, this is somewhere I keep returning, and I’m beginning to think that a little more planning could help me make something of it.

I want to share the writing here more regularly. Whole chapters, released in an order you can follow, with other articles opening up the world around them.

There will be music. The radio in my bedroom. Gregg’s records. Television you had to wait for. Toys that looked considerably better in the commercials. The things we wanted, the things our parents thought we meant, and the things we did with what we actually got.

There will also be pieces connected to what I’m learning in therapy school. Some of those ideas help me ask better questions about the material. They don’t need to sit underneath every memory explaining it. Sometimes I was just playing Nintendo.

One passage from the bedroom chapter keeps coming back to me:

The house did not preserve my childhood bedroom.
It kept the shape.
My memory supplied the rest.
Not perfectly.
Enough.

That’s part of what this work feels like. I have the old books, the notebook, photographs, memories, and people I can still ask. I’m finding places where I rushed past something before. I’m also finding ordinary afternoons I’m glad I wrote down.

I’m not looking for fame or fortune here. I would like communication with an audience. I want people to read something, recognize something, disagree with something, or tell me what it brought back for them. I’d like to hear from you.

The blog gives that conversation somewhere to happen.

I’m not setting a launch date for the chapter series yet. I want the childhood book to have a clear shape before we begin releasing it in order. There’s still writing to do, and I don’t want a posting schedule deciding what I remember.

But we’re making a plan and collecting the material now. The book is growing, and the blog is becoming part of how I want it to reach people.

You’ll get the boy in the yard, my brother’s music, my mother’s hands, and my father coming through the door.

And, unfortunately for my ankle, the parachute.