Early Years

Yes indeed, that is a good graphic for what was going on in the last chapter of Misdemeanors & Felonies . . . Chapter 4 to be exact.

The Early Years . . .

A time of excitement and a time of realizing that there was another world past the doors of Sam and Orean Bolton's doors. I started to school. Fell in love. Learned how to get attention by being the class clown, and all this in the first grade.

We all have the tendency to look back at our life, and the older we become, the more we seem to do that. Of course there is more to look back to as the years pile up, but still, nostalgia is commonplace among us. The thing is, I am finding out, that looking back in your mind about things that happened fifty some odd years ago is one thing, but to look back at it and try to recreate it on a page of a book, is quite another. One tends to sit staring at the monitor like a sad sack until something comes. And I am finding out that it is hard to do that. I know, I've been saying that writing this story would be hard, but what I was really talking about was the connection between my children's mothers and what happened or didn't happen to send me on down the road. And I know that is going to be difficult, but the simple fact of trying to compile a chapter, say like Chapter 4, where it was mostly about being at one of the one-a-month Sunday get-togethers at my grandparents log house out in the country. Whereas I can picture it in my thoughts, but it is not that easy to try to capture the essence of those once-a-month soirees.

Be that as it may, the Misdemeanors & Felonies is going along. I don't expect it to flow as some of my novels. Novels are fiction and if you get stuck you can always back up and go in another direction. I suppose in a manner of speaking you can do the same thing in an autobiography up to a point. You can, if stuck, just quit what you are trying to write and jump twenty or so years ahead of where you are and play that up. I don't like to do that, however, it is a "thing" with me to finish what I have started. At least when it comes to writing. Too bad I didn't have that same sense of ethics as pertaining to life all those years ago. I wouldn't have to be writing Misdemeanors & Felonies if I'd taken care of business then.

Ah, but I didn't and now I am writing it, so we have to go with what we have. I imagine I'll start to get in the groove as far as my writing flow pretty soon, at least I hope so, because I want to get this first draft done, because I know that is when the real work will begin, the editing of it. I wish I could afford a professional editor, but I have never been able to go that route, and I know I won't be able to now. Unless I hit the lottery, and since I hardly ever play the damn thing, I'm not looking for that.

I am finding out that writing about your past gives you an omniscient way of seeing things. It is like the fact that my mother lived her whole life with a severe case of inferiority complex. I didn't know that then. I didn't even know that she seems to have passed it on to me and all those years of roaming and getting into trouble was a direct result of that problem. I would have denied it, and fought you bloody if you had come to me during, say, the sixties, and sat me down and tried to explain that fact to me. But you'd have been right. I just went about it differently than did my mother. Whereas she wanted everyone to admire her and what pitiful little possessions she had, I was hell bent on destroying anything that smacked of "respectability." That gene in me, if it was a gene, who the hell knows, caused a lot of people a lot of problems.

Tomorrow . . .

MY NOVELS:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742