THIS BLIMP MAY ACTUALLY FLY: MOVING TOWARDS PUBLISHING MY MEMOIR

ON WRITING, PUBLISHING and MARKETING YOUR MEMOIR

                                     POST # 19

This last patch of time since post #18 has been an emotional roller coaster. I have been totally committed to publishing my memoir - thirty five years in the making - tentatively called: MY ODYSSEY: TREATING DRUG ADDICTS IN THE SIXTIES and WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF.

THE SUBJECT MATTER                                    

In 1968-1969 I was a budding psychotherapist working in a seminal therapeutic community treating heroin addicts. What I initially experienced as a dream come true - a veritable personal and professional Garden of Eden - turned into a mind blowing kaleidoscopic nightmare as the boundaries between me and my addict population blurred. During the course of the 17 months I worked at Odyssey House I reversed roles from an observing participant to a participant observer.

I began in ernest to write and publish my memoir over thirty five years ago. It has only been in the last two years that I have gone all out to complete this task doing all that is necessary to do the subject matter the justice it deserves.

Having broken a signed contract to publish with a "vanity" press I reconnected with my original agent who agreed to reread the latest incarnation of my manuscript. Liking what she read she offered to be my editor as well as my agent.

Post #17 leaves off where we have the joint task of completing chapter I and chapter IV for submission to various publishers. This brings me to the present moment.

OBJECTIVE:

For the last six or so weeks the central task has been to nail down chapters I and IV letter perfect.

THE PENDULUM SWINGS

This period of time was characterized by an experience of highs, lows, and coming to a relatively stable balance point.

First the high...  I found myself daring to move to the right of neutral getting a natural high on indulging in dreams of glory. These dreams included: having multiple publishers engage in a bidding war; receiving an outrageous six figure amount of money for an advance {if the 19 year old Indian author from Harvard can get $500,000 for two books shouldn't a 69 year old American author who graduated from Columbia College among other institutions of higher learning be worth at least $100.000?,and I will testify under oath I am telling the unvarnished truth to boot; Oprah calls me personally to enquire what date would be best for me to appear on her show?; I am thrilled to have received honors for the best book on drug addiction ever written;  Columbia University is inscribing my name in stone on Butler Library next to Spinoza {my favorite philosopher}; and, perhaps most important of all, I am invited back to my elementary, junior, and senior high schools in Miami Beach to talk to the student body.There were additional fantasies too numerous too mention but I am certain that those who are continuing to read this article have more than gotten the point.

Now the Low

I have observed that from time to time in editing and reediting my material I have understood some of it in surprisingly radical ways. At some point in my luxuriating in my flights of fancy I unexpectedly hit a familiar brick wall. Any writer knows that in fantasy all is possible but the trick is to keep sufficiently contained to be able to come back to terra firma and tick off the next task on ones to do list.

The next task for me was to clear up some unclear passages that were emotionally charged. Tackling this assignment brought me back to the years between graduating Columbia and coming to Odyssey. Although I had been working, and loving, and relating, and all the stuff one is supposed to be doing in those establisment years, I felt internally mired in my own negative inertia. I began many projects but found myself to enervated to finish any of them. Later on in my psychoanalysis I would discover there were many complex reasons why this was so but at the time all I could conclude was that although I aspired very high I would typically fail to achieve my objective and inevitably fall very low. The myth of Sysaphus was easy to identify with.

Now many years past that time I was beginning to experience similar feelings as I had then. My dreams of glory rapidly shifted to being stuck in emotional mud.: soaring turned into stuckness; transcendence was converted into doubts; boundless energy was transformed into negative inertia.

But as I felt this shift in feelings from positive to negative it didn't seem to fit what is actually going on in my present. Then I realized I was experiencing the true nature of the feelings I had fifty years ago - that is really experience the true experience of what it was that I nearly drowned in and couldn't seem to escape no matter what I did to get free.

In recognizing what it was that was happening to me was a key to springing an experiential lock. The pendulum swung once again neither to the right nor the left but coming to rest in the middle - a balance point.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS, JUST WORDS

Having a new burst of energy I was able to settle down and attend to the issue at hand. I re edited the two chapters until I felt I couldn't improve upon them. So did my editor. Then we exchanged our products. We both made corrections and additions. Then we met and went over each page paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word hashing out our differences until we were in total agreement. This has been a most enlightening experience.

In so doing I was able to learn new ways to improve my writing. Avoid repetition of certain pet words; omit all and anthing that is extraneous to the meat of what is being focused upon; eliminate distracting adjectives; simplify, simplify, simplify.

I clearly see how the structure of what is being written is like what happens in a good painting. There is a balance between the various parts of the whole as if the manuscript is a  carefully constructed verbal quilt - a by product of what Yeats refers to as a blend of "passion and precision."

The dreams of glory are understandable but really not the main point. Similarly, the doubts and  fears are just that doubts and fears. What is the point is that I believe that what I am attempting to publish is of sufficient importance that it merits all the effort to be as exact, clear, and effective as I am capable of being at the moment.

We plan to submit the first two chapters, an overview, a marketing plan, comments on the competition by the beginning of June.

My conclusion

If I continue to keep steady, do what is necessary, put one foot in front of the other, focus, keep grounded I will continue to manufacture the necessary psychological helium to fly my literary blimp. If James Frey can do it why can't I?