I've cut back on blogging. Have you missed me?

Manuscript copies for my beta readers. Oh, and a little gift to make it worth their while.

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve cut back on blogging.

When I started this blog, my intention was to tell stories from my life, and that’s pretty much what I did almost every week for a full year.

I love a human interest story – something that gives me a window into a person’s life and mind. Something that makes me feel. And I love getting lost in a well-told story. It’s an escape. That’s what I wanted in my blogs.

Now it’s time to focus on one specific human interest story:  the story of my memoir.

What you’ll see going forward on these pages will be snippets and scenes as my manuscript progresses. I’m devoting so much time and energy to finishing it, I’ll be posting here less often.

When I do post, it will be much more personal than my previous blogs, and that scares me. But if I’m going to put my memoir out into the world, I’d better get used to it, right?

Fifteen years ago, when I started my memoir about my son Matt’s brain tumor journey, it was the accounting of what happened – symptoms at age eight, diagnosis and surgery at age eleven, recovery for, well, for ever it seemed. The true story had so many twists and turns and unbelievable diagnoses, I felt it had to be told. It read like a novel.

Then a few years into the writing, I realized it was more about me, as a mom, on a difficult journey that I was not cut out for. It was a story of survival; not Matt’s survival. Mine.

And survive we did,  along with our family, intact. Sometimes it’s still hard to believe.

Twenty years after his surgery, Matt wrote about it here. If you wonder how well he recovered, just take a peek.

As for my recovery, well, you’ll have to wait to read my book 🙂

In the meantime, my beta readers – like junior editors (who happen to be my book club peeps) got their hard copies of the first section of my manuscript this week at our book club meeting. Well, our meetings are really more of an excuse to drink Prosecco and catch up with each other, but we do honestly read books. Well, most of us read at least a little of them most of the time.

I trust these other three ladies with the soul-dump that will be my memoir. After they finish reading, they will know me better, and know more about me, than my own family. Even my husband Michael, as he reads my drafts, has learned things about me that he didn’t know after 35 years of marriage. Things he didn’t know about how poorly equipped I was to handle our family crisis.

Outing the real truth has begun.

Wish me luck.