I Spent The Lock-down Year 2021 Writing My Memoir
It started with a 2020 Christmas present from my daughters.
Once in a while over the years someone would bring up the subject of memoirs and I would mention that I was going to write my own memoir someday. But I never did anything about it and no one took me seriously.
Then my two daughters got together and decided that they would do something about it. And so on Christmas 2020 they presented me with a year’s subscription to Storyworth. Here’s how it worked (the following paragraph is an excerpt from my book’s afterword):
Every week for a year I would receive an email message with a question about some aspect of my life. I would mull over the matter for a few days and then submit my reply. The following Monday I would receive another question. For several months these questions would be more or less random but my daughters would throw out any question that was not at all appropriate. About halfway through the year I gave my daughters a list of topics that I would like to cover and so most of the remaining questions for the year were based on this list.
It was an ideal time in my life to write the book. My wife and I have traveled extensively since I retired in 1999. And I began blogging about our travels in 2010. But we had been in Covid lock-down since March 2020 and we weren’t going anywhere in 2021. So I spent the year writing my book.
I completed Chapter 52 on January 10, 2022 and after a final proofing by my grandson clicked on the button labeled Order. The Storyworth subscription included one hardcover book which I received about a week later. I then began to revise the book, adding an afterword and a few photos, deleting a few blank pages, and inserting some boldface and italics here and there.
Storyworth charges extra fees for books that go over 400 pages and for printing color photos. I thought the price for additional copies of my book was a tad high and so I went to another publisher (Lulu) to produce soft cover copies of my book for family members.
Please note that the book is not for sale. Because of privacy issues we have decided that copies of the book be only available within the family.
In April 2022 I became interested in writing on Medium and I signed up for Sarah Cy’s Firebutt Challenge. I then published my first Medium story on May 1st, 2022. This story is # 47.
I plan to continue my writing on Medium and publish one story a week in 2023. The rest of my time will be devoted to writing my second book. I began researching the life of John Charles Fremont fifty years ago and feel it is about time that I put my notes together and publish my findings.
And then maybe I will write another book in 2024. Look what my daughters started with their Christmas gift!
A few weeks ago JoAnn Ryan wrote a story called “Are You Working on a Book Project?” in her Medium publication The Midnight Garden. This story is my reply to her four questions.
