My, how time flies...

I know I started a story and then left you hanging, and I'm sorry. But living in The Big Apple is kinda time consuming... 


Every morning I roll out of bed, pull on jeans and a fleece, hat, scarf, down coat, warm boots and mittens, and Zoe and I head for the park. We just discovered Fort Greene Park, where dogs are allowed off-leash until 9 in the morning, and that's now our daily destination. It's about 4 blocks from here and every morning the sidewalks are filled with commuters walking purposefully to work, and moms or nannies, often with full strollers, walking their kids to a school near the park. Zoe has adapted amazing well to the crowded sidewalks and trots right along. Until she notices someone she finds particularly interesting and then she either tries to say hello, or just stares at them as we go by. She makes people smile, and at 7:30 on a frigid Brooklyn morning, I think that's pretty cool.


It would be wonderful if I could get all my errands done when I'm up and out early with Zoe, but since I can't take her in any store that sells food, I have to make two trips. Often covering the same territory. It's a bit frustrating, but I keep telling myself that all this walking is keeping me healthy. 


I decided to paint the apartment. Given the size of the place, I figured I could get it all done in one day. Someone told me the nearest hardware store that sells paint is about a mile and a half away, so one morning I walked there, lugged home paint and supplies, painted the living room - two coats - and hated the color. So back to the hardware store, lug home more paint and supplies (I'll bet you're thinking: aren't there those yellow cars called "cabs" in New York? Yes, there are cabs, but I'm determined to only take one if it's absolutely, positively necessary. And so far I haven't run into a situation that fits those parameters), and paint the living room again. This time I love the color - but run out of paint before I'm done. Another someone tells me about another hardware store that sells Ben Moore and it's only about a half mile from here! Yippee! I walk there, pick up just a little more paint, come home, finish the living room and... the colors don't match. Different store, different mixer, slightly different color. Back to the first store, more damn paint and the living room is DONE. A one-day task that slipped into a one-week ordeal.




Then there's the subway trips into Manhattan. I made it to Crate & Barrel and back in 45 minutes the other day. Forty-five minutes to Crate & Barrel! And back! For a girl who has lived in the wilds of New Hampshire for twenty-five years and who has had to drive an hour and a half one way to find a C&B, that is LIFE ALTERING! There was this pillow I'd seen on the Pottery Barn website. I wanted to see it in person. That trip took a little over an hour. That includes round-trip on the 4/5 train (I sound like a New Yorker, huh?), wandering the store and coming home. 


I have no idea how the days fly by, but they do. And I'm loving every second.

Views...

It's time to share some of the views from the apartment with you. I promise to get lots of pictures of my neighborhood and surrounding areas once the weather is better. It's been too damn cold to take off my gloves to point and shoot!!!!!


First - Early morning from my windows facing West with the sun just hitting the buildings.

New York Harbor. High rises in the background are on the southern tip of Manhattan.

Small, older building on the left is Borough Hall. This part of Brooklyn is called Brooklyn Heights.

Manhattan Bridge is only visible if I stand close to the window and look hard right - hence the less-than-sharp colors

The land you see in front of Lady Liberty is Governor's Island. Obviously this is the max close-up
my little camera can get.

That orange boat is the Staten Island Ferry. There is one crossing constantly. Better shot of Governor's Island.

* * * * * *

Next are a couple of late afternoon and early evening shots. These are looking more southerly towards the mouth of the harbor

* * * * * *

And finally....  On the 4th night we were here, we had an amazing experience. At about 7 pm, just as it got dark, fireworks started shooting into the sky from either side of the Statue of Liberty. They were all red, white and blue and sparkles. It was, to say the least, goosebumpy awesome! Then we realized there was a huge ship cruising past Lady Liberty. Then another and finally, a third. The Queen Mary 2, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth 2 were all in port. Apparently this has never happened before and the city decided to give them a true NYC/USA send-off. Obviously no photos could possibly do this incredible scene justice - especially with a little point and shoot camera like mine, but I have to share just a few of my fuzzy photos.

The bow of the QM2 is just appearing in the upper right corner

An enormous ship. They all were.

Welcome to New York...

Final Revision?

Part 4 of: From Blank Screen to Printed Book OR Writing the Book was the Fun Part...


With a lot of often painful revising and cutting, I reduced the 150,000 word first draft of my book into a tight and nimble 73,000 word manuscript. I felt great about the end result and couldn't imagine Suzanne - my editor - would feel the need to do more than a few minor tweaks. Wrong. Apparently, publishers won't look at a memoir that rises over the 70,000 word mark. Who knew the creative process was, in reality, a numbers game?


Suzanne spent a few weeks reviewing my 73,000 words and then sent them back. The pages on which they lay, now covered with penciled arrows and slashes. I will admit, my first reaction was anger. It was PERFECT! I took some time for my initial defensive flare to cool, then went through the pages slowly and ended up incorporating about 60% of the changes she made. Although I couldn't bring myself to agree with all she thought should be done, her suggestions made me look at the content with new eyes and pushed me to do some rewriting that I wouldn't have done otherwise. In other words, once again, she pushed me to be better.  


I loved writing my book. I really loved the process of sitting down at my computer, tapping on the keys and watching the words fill up the screen. I even loved the revision process, as painful as it sometimes was, because I was learning, growing. I was about to be introduced to the business side of writing a book. The love fest was over.


To be continued...

New York, New York

I apologize for the long lapse since my last post, but it has been a crazed, life-altering few weeks. 


A week before Christmas, hubby's boss told him that the company would subsidize an apartment for a year while we wait for the house to sell. But, if we were going to take advantage of the offer, we had to do it immediately.  Fortunately I was in the city, so I immediately hit the internet to get a feel for what was out there. It took about 15 minutes to realize we couldn't afford to live in Manhattan. So on a blustery, freezing cold day, I subway'd it over to Brooklyn, looked at as many apartments as I could find and, of course, found the perfect one! It is in a new building with great amenities. Garage parking for hubby, washer & dryer in the unit for me, great gym for both of us (we just have to USE it...). We plopped down a holding fee, application fees, first month's rent and security deposit, then headed home to celebrate Christmas and organize a move.


The challenge of pulling this together - besides moving in two weeks with Christmas week being the first of the two - was keeping to as strict a budget as possible without taking much stuff from our NH house as it is still on the market and, if it doesn't sell, I'll go back for the summer. So, we took furniture from the finished basement, one rug from the living room and I went through the kitchen grabbing everything that I had two of (an embarrassing number of things, as it turned out). We combed the attic looking for stuff, but with two kids who'd done the same thing a few years ago, it was slim pickin's... 


On January 7th, I picked up a UHaul truck, and that night with the help of some good friends (did I forget to mention that hubby was away on business the first week of January and didn't get home until 6 pm the night before we moved?), loaded it and our car with a couch and love seat, one chair, a rug and lots of boxes. At 6 a.m. the next morning, with Zoe cozy and snug between boxes in the back seat of the car, our little caravan pulled out of the driveway, headed for our latest Great Adventure!


We are settling in beautifully. The kids were here to help us unload and unpack and have been over for dinner since. We did an insane Ikea run the day after we moved in and spent every evening last week putting furniture together. Zoe loves her long morning walks and play-time in the local dog park, and once the weather warms up a bit, I'm sure I will too!! She has been amazingly mellow throughout this entire experience and is quickly learning leash and elevator etiquette. I love our bright and sunny apartment. It's small and comfortable and I can clean it in about ten minutes! And when I want to go somewhere, the subway is mere steps from my door.


I promise to get back to the saga of the book this week, but had to share our news first. Pretty cool, huh?

Merry Christmas!!

I am home from NYC, happily settling in with hubby and both boys for a wonderful country Christmas. Life is good.

I wanted to share some pictures I took last year in New York. As you will see, that amazing city can offer it's own kind of magic this time of the year.

A tiny surprise near MoMA (Museum of Modern Art)

Mr. George M. Cohan looks out over a snowy Times Square

George & Ozzie...

At the top of the distant tower is the New Year's "Ball" just under "2009"

The famous tree at Rockefeller Plaza

From our home to yours, 
warmest wishes for a wonderful Holiday

Kill your darlings...

Part 3 of: From Blank Screen to Printed Book OR Writing the Book was the Fun Part...




It was William Faulkner who advised, "In writing, you must kill your darlings." I now know exactly what he meant.


Usually putting together a thought on paper - or screen - is, for me, painfully difficult. The words must be dragged from my brain, cursing, kicking and screaming. I type, I delete. Pause. Type and delete again (which, by the way, I have just done here - several times). But on very rare occasions, the perfect phrase or sentence or even entire paragraph flows out of my brain, through my fingers and onto the screen. Those moments are what I imagine a runner's high must be like. I feel breathless and brilliant. I want to grab that sentence and hug it. I want to protect the words and I can't believe I would ever delete them. 


Then comes REVISION. And, no matter how much you adore those words, if they are extraneous to what you are trying to share with your reader, you must ruthlessly hit the delete key. And it hurts. 
In the late summer of 2009, I met with my editor Suzanne and we talked about what I wanted the finished book to be.


"Is this a business how-to for entrepreneurs or a personal memoir that's about what you experienced?" she asked. 


I laughed. "You kidding?? No one would want to start a business the way I did!" This was a no-brainer. "A personal memoir about what I experienced."


"Then ditch as much of the business stuff as you can and focus on you. That's what your reader wants - she wants to know what you were feeling, not how you calculated gross margin. How what you were doing affected the rest of your life." 


I found myself squirming - suddenly feeling extremely uncomfortable. Suzanne leaned toward me. "You're like most women - you find it hard to think in terms of "me". Focusing on yourself is difficult, foreign. It makes you uncomfortable. But that's why readers will love this book. They will identify with you and the issues you faced. They will care about you and will want you to succeed. They don't care about the numbers and the business details." She sat back in her chair and smiled. "You want to write a how-to book? We'll do that next."


And so began the revision process that would last close to a year. I would review a chapter, completely rewriting in some places, fine tuning in others, and cutting, cutting, cutting. All the cuts would be pasted onto the end of the chapter so Suzanne could review them. I found it hard to focus on myself and in the early chapters she would patiently point out that I was cutting the wrong stuff. I would go back and rewrite again. We settled into a pattern where, when she felt something needed work, she would say things like "Show me, don't tell me" or "I can't see this" or "Put this into scene” or “This phrase/word is overused” and I would go back and often struggle to completely redo a paragraph, a page, a section. The early chapters took three to four rewrites, but slowly I began to hear her in my mind as I typed and the rewrites dropped to two or three per chapter. But more importantly, her comments now were more targeted, more advanced – making my writing better. And I knew it. It was an amazing feeling. 


When the revision was complete, she congratulated me again. “Now put it away for a month or so, then start at the beginning and do it again.”


It wasn’t what I wanted to hear especially, but this time I wasn’t taken by surprise and I knew she was right. I put it away for a few weeks, then opened the word doc that was the first chapter and started again. This was when I realized just how much I had learned. I saw things I hadn’t seen before. I deleted, I rewrote, I added scene and I made it better. By the last chapters, the changes were minimal. When I was done, I had cut the manuscript from 150,000 words to 73,000 words.


“Alright, now print it out and send it to me,” Suzanne said when I told her I was done. “It’s my turn.”


To be continued...


This will be end of the saga until after the Holidays. I need to step away from the blog for a couple of weeks to work on formatting the book. Oh yeah - and to shop, wrap, decorate, bake and spend a wonderful week in NYC with my family and some close friends (I may post a photo or two).  Happy Holidays!

Just Get the Story Down

Part 2 of:  From Blank Screen to Printed Book OR Writing the Book was the Fun Part...

Writing a book sounds like a wonderful - and rather romantic - thing to do. Imagine sitting surrounded by nature at some wilderness writer's retreat, or maybe looking out the window of an fabulous NY brownstone channeling Carrie Bradshaw, tapping furiously at the keys of your laptop as the perfect words fill the blank screen. I mean, James Patterson publishes three or four (or more) books a year - how hard could it be? 

Hard. I tried it and after several months of start and stop, I stopped for good. Or until my friend Steve asked me to please talk to this independent editor he knew...

I emailed Suzanne Kingsbury www.suzannekingsbury.net, author and free-lance editor, told her my tale and asked if she'd be willing to read the eighty-odd pages I'd managed - in seven months - to get down. She requested a phone call first and we stayed on the phone for an hour and a half, laughing and chatting like old friends. "Now you can send me your pages," she announced as our call wrapped up. 

I sent her an email with my pages attached then sat back and waited. Two days later, we talked again. She loved what I'd written and asked me to put in an email exactly why I'd found writing so difficult. What about it wasn't fun? What did I feel when I sat down to write that made it so hard? It turned out to be an eye-opening exercise. I discovered that my primary de-motivator was fear. I was afraid that what I'd written was awful, that I had no talent whatsoever. And I was afraid I'd put months and months into writing it, only to produce something no one would want to read. I'd been so afraid, I had told almost no one I was writing a book. 

"Classic writer's block," she said. "Just get the story down. This is your first draft, so don't worry about anything but getting the story down. We'll turn it into a book later."

It turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear. I set myself a goal of writing for at least two hours, three days a week. It wasn't long before I was sitting down to write at every opportunity and the words flowed. Suzanne read each chapter and returned only positive feedback, which was hard to take at first. What about all the stuff I was doing wrong? She assured me I would learn this way and that I should just keep doing what I was doing. 

In May 2009, nine months after I started working with her, I finished my first draft. It was almost 500 double-spaced pages and 150,000 words. I figured I'd be ready to publish before Christmas. I knew the manuscript needed some adjustments, but honestly didn't think it would need much.

"Congratulations!" Suzanne emailed when she finished reading the Epilogue. "Now comes the fun part. We get to cut it in half!"

What?????

To be continued...