for sharing such intimate details of the past ten/fifteen years of your remarkable life. I hope you realize what you accomplished by simply putting it all on paper, much less sharing it with all the rest of us. It is a little hard for me to grasp how someone younger than my granddaughter could have survived such experiences and still come out on top, as you have done so well.
I hope you've given some thought to the therapeutic effects of taking the next logical step, though I doubt you have.
For the first 50 years that I shared my life with the most remarkable person on earth I begged, pleaded, then eventually nagged my late wife to begin collecting content for a draft of her memoir.
I knew from the day after we met, in 1959, that not only did the world deserve to hear her story but also the author herself could only realize her life of achievements once she read the first draft of her manuscript.
In our 58th year she began collecting the content, and handed me a 40,000-word draft in January, two years later, which she titled "Snakes on the Porch."
She had typed the entire draft on her personal computer, with the one good hand God gave her at birth, just like she did everything else, for 83 years . . .
The end of June that year she received her paperback copy, just 30 days before our 60th anniversary.
She died, suddenly, unexpectedly and painlessly the week before Thanksgiving that year (2020), having spent many hours of the interim sitting on the back porch re-reading her book, enjoying some of the most therapeutic hours of her difficult life.
I've been getting to know you for several years, Caitlin, starting with the day I first chose your General Proofreading course ( and later, transcripts, too) above all the rest, once I decided to monetize my lifelong passion for proofreading, in my retirement years.
Granted, your curriculum was superior to the rest, but the deciding factor for me was when you candidly volunteered details about yourself, like your bout with Bipolar disorder. I admired your guts!
As I read your dispatch of today I couldn't help but notice how many of your own achievements you failed to mention, but I hope one day you, too will consider to think about collecting some content for your own memoir. I'd be happy to help if I can, even if only to be around when you want to bounce some ideas off someone.
When I saw how much it did for Pat to read what she had researched and written, I realized how many of the other heroes in my life (parents, relatives, acquaintances) went to their rewards without their stories being told. I decided to find a way to get more people to at least start thinking about a memoir.
I started a blog (non-monetized) to suggest the "How" and the "Why"of doing that
After 4 - 5 years it has become too much to keep up so, earlier this year I published the main posts as a low-content e-Book, to protect the "Resources" section, as much as anything else. The Blog itself will come offline soon.
If I eventually publish the eBook as a paperback, I'll be sure to send you a copy, hoping you'll give some serious thought to collecting some content for your own remarkable story.
Hi Jim! Thank you for your kind and thoughtful words 🙏 I started writing my memoir a few months ago. I'm not sure when I'll start back up on it; I'm kinda thinking that I'll just keep writing articles like these on substack and eventually put everything together. I wrote about 20k words earlier this year but it leaned way too heavy into the asshole with whom I used to work, the reason I sold PA. I only just realized who this guy actually was (a narcissist), since he'd been so cleverly disguised for so long, calling many others in his past a narcissist to throw me off the scent. A master manipulator, he was.
I'm coming alive in more ways than I ever dreamed, especially as I continue my vanlife adventures. I'm very much focused on being in the present moment, and perhaps that's why I put the memoir aside -- it's a lot to look at. It's been a wild decade. I've considered working with someone else, dictating/recording the stories audibly and allowing that other person to compile it for me. The tediousness of it all is, I think, what causes me to stop the project. When it gets too long, I become overwhelmed by the detail. I think I'm too close to it. Or I'm overthinking and I just need to write it ALL out and allow an editor to decide what stays and what goes.
That's EXACTLY the way you should be doing it! Write when you feel like it and keep it a fun exercise. Pat did most of her early content on 3X5 cards as she thought of something, then piled them next to her computer to be fleshed out the next time she felt like it. That's why it took her two years to compile a draft.
Editing and proofreading (and ghostwriting) are what I did for most of my corporate years, so it was easy for me to do the developmental and copyediting, then proofreading and publishing.
The main point I try to make in my book (Write the Story of You) is that any moment when the process ceases to be fun for you is the moment you should drop it and do something else until you get the urge to continue, whenever that might be.
After all, what's the hurry?
It sounds to me like you're in the process of creating a "Re-start" to your whole life, Caitlin, and given the traumas of your past, that may be a wise decision.
As such, casual efforts to put together a memoir might just be the kind of diversion you could turn to need to take a break from the focus of your new adventures.
And as it progresses, you'll find it is a handy tool to remind you of your past successes.
I'll never forget how often I used to hear Pat commenting, as she researched her content, things like: "Gee, I'd forgotten how much fun we had with the kids when we first moved to San Francisco . . ."
Thank you, Caitlin,
for sharing such intimate details of the past ten/fifteen years of your remarkable life. I hope you realize what you accomplished by simply putting it all on paper, much less sharing it with all the rest of us. It is a little hard for me to grasp how someone younger than my granddaughter could have survived such experiences and still come out on top, as you have done so well.
I hope you've given some thought to the therapeutic effects of taking the next logical step, though I doubt you have.
For the first 50 years that I shared my life with the most remarkable person on earth I begged, pleaded, then eventually nagged my late wife to begin collecting content for a draft of her memoir.
I knew from the day after we met, in 1959, that not only did the world deserve to hear her story but also the author herself could only realize her life of achievements once she read the first draft of her manuscript.
In our 58th year she began collecting the content, and handed me a 40,000-word draft in January, two years later, which she titled "Snakes on the Porch."
She had typed the entire draft on her personal computer, with the one good hand God gave her at birth, just like she did everything else, for 83 years . . .
The end of June that year she received her paperback copy, just 30 days before our 60th anniversary.
She died, suddenly, unexpectedly and painlessly the week before Thanksgiving that year (2020), having spent many hours of the interim sitting on the back porch re-reading her book, enjoying some of the most therapeutic hours of her difficult life.
I've been getting to know you for several years, Caitlin, starting with the day I first chose your General Proofreading course ( and later, transcripts, too) above all the rest, once I decided to monetize my lifelong passion for proofreading, in my retirement years.
Granted, your curriculum was superior to the rest, but the deciding factor for me was when you candidly volunteered details about yourself, like your bout with Bipolar disorder. I admired your guts!
As I read your dispatch of today I couldn't help but notice how many of your own achievements you failed to mention, but I hope one day you, too will consider to think about collecting some content for your own memoir. I'd be happy to help if I can, even if only to be around when you want to bounce some ideas off someone.
When I saw how much it did for Pat to read what she had researched and written, I realized how many of the other heroes in my life (parents, relatives, acquaintances) went to their rewards without their stories being told. I decided to find a way to get more people to at least start thinking about a memoir.
I started a blog (non-monetized) to suggest the "How" and the "Why"of doing that
(WritetheStoryofYou.com ).
After 4 - 5 years it has become too much to keep up so, earlier this year I published the main posts as a low-content e-Book, to protect the "Resources" section, as much as anything else. The Blog itself will come offline soon.
If I eventually publish the eBook as a paperback, I'll be sure to send you a copy, hoping you'll give some serious thought to collecting some content for your own remarkable story.
Let me know if I can help with that . . .
<3
Jim McCarthy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-mccarthy-jmcontent/
Hi Jim! Thank you for your kind and thoughtful words 🙏 I started writing my memoir a few months ago. I'm not sure when I'll start back up on it; I'm kinda thinking that I'll just keep writing articles like these on substack and eventually put everything together. I wrote about 20k words earlier this year but it leaned way too heavy into the asshole with whom I used to work, the reason I sold PA. I only just realized who this guy actually was (a narcissist), since he'd been so cleverly disguised for so long, calling many others in his past a narcissist to throw me off the scent. A master manipulator, he was.
I'm coming alive in more ways than I ever dreamed, especially as I continue my vanlife adventures. I'm very much focused on being in the present moment, and perhaps that's why I put the memoir aside -- it's a lot to look at. It's been a wild decade. I've considered working with someone else, dictating/recording the stories audibly and allowing that other person to compile it for me. The tediousness of it all is, I think, what causes me to stop the project. When it gets too long, I become overwhelmed by the detail. I think I'm too close to it. Or I'm overthinking and I just need to write it ALL out and allow an editor to decide what stays and what goes.
That's EXACTLY the way you should be doing it! Write when you feel like it and keep it a fun exercise. Pat did most of her early content on 3X5 cards as she thought of something, then piled them next to her computer to be fleshed out the next time she felt like it. That's why it took her two years to compile a draft.
Editing and proofreading (and ghostwriting) are what I did for most of my corporate years, so it was easy for me to do the developmental and copyediting, then proofreading and publishing.
The main point I try to make in my book (Write the Story of You) is that any moment when the process ceases to be fun for you is the moment you should drop it and do something else until you get the urge to continue, whenever that might be.
After all, what's the hurry?
It sounds to me like you're in the process of creating a "Re-start" to your whole life, Caitlin, and given the traumas of your past, that may be a wise decision.
As such, casual efforts to put together a memoir might just be the kind of diversion you could turn to need to take a break from the focus of your new adventures.
And as it progresses, you'll find it is a handy tool to remind you of your past successes.
I'll never forget how often I used to hear Pat commenting, as she researched her content, things like: "Gee, I'd forgotten how much fun we had with the kids when we first moved to San Francisco . . ."
Good luck, and please keep me posted,
Jim McCarthy