One More Day And Counting

Well the table of contents are done and the acknowledgement. I am ready to print out the beast and sent it. Of course, I will be sending it on the last official day to send the manuscript and I hope that is saying to the publishers, yes she is brilliant and not down right lazy. This is the way I do things. I am not saying it is a good way but hell I am getting it in the mail.

All that said and done, I think I have a better shot at Breadloaf then Yale; I could go on my long tirade about Gluck and female writers. Has she ever picked a woman for a contest? But it seems like a waste of breath and Philip Levine, who is picking for breadloaf this year, is the person who first noticed Dorrianne Laux and brought her to print so I feel like at least I have the, I know someone who knows someone, who likes my work thing going for me.

The funny thing is how much the book has changed for me. How much I have been changed by writing this book. I first started out trying to find the best formula and had Carolyn Forche read the manuscript, which isn’t a bad way to go. Then I became obsessed with everyone else’s first books and how they were oh so much better then mine.

I began to think my story wasn’t worth telling so I went back to formula, of course sometimes finding my own voice and weaving in and out of feeling like it was/wasn't working. Now I am at wanting the book to be for me, not anyone else and in doing that it has become mine. It has become what it needed all along to be, alive. It required my blood.

I don’t think it is done. I don’t think it will ever be done. But this is a story of a girl from Maine, who married, divorced, traveled to Haiti, had two babies (nothing is in order) and somehow found a voice to write it down. And it is my story.