Starting Again

Up early writing and I’m loving this free time, this morning time, when it’s just me, my thoughts, and my laptop. Feels so wonderful to be working on something other than Have a Little Piece of Me.

I’ll be blogging on the editing process with my editor and the publishing process with my publisher. (Can’t believe I have an editor and a publisher! Yay! :-)) I’m quickly learning this is really the beginning. I always thought you finish the memoir, publish the memoir, and your baby is out in the world. Luckily, that is not the case. My “meme” needs some serious work, but I’m looking forward to digging deep with my editor and making Have a Little Piece of me the best it can be. It feels so good to have people who aren’t related to me and who aren’t my friends believe in my work. I know we don’t write for that validation, but it feels divine.

Kind of giddy working on this new piece. My new memoir picks up where Have a Little Piece of Me ended. It chronicles my first years in the Army. I already see a difference in the writing and in the sense of urgency coming from this new narrator. She was such a confused, damaged, angry, but brave little girl. Reading over it, seventeen seems so far away from the life I’m living now.

Isn’t that how this thing goes? We look back at the years that we lived and we don’t know how we got where we are. I was looking at a recent episode of Super Soul Sunday on the O network and one of the speakers, Jack Kornfield, spoke of the soul as something that is “timeless, unborn, and not limited by this body and mind.” The body itself will change. The hair will fall away, the skin will wrinkle, and speaking from personal experience, things that used to sit up nicely will eventually succumb to gravity, but those physical characteristics have nothing to do with the soul. The soul is everlasting and even as the body changes, the soul/the spirit remains the same. That means the soul of the little girl walking to James Hurst Elementary that first day of school, is the same girl who boarded that plane to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the same girl who first held her newborn, the same girl who taught her first day of Composition, and the same girl who will hold her childhood memories in the form of a book in her hand. You don’t feel so alone when you realize all that you’ve gone through, good and bad, you, your soul remains intact. Thank God for that wholeness, despite, at times, being broken.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all! Looking forward to all of the beauty 2014 will bring!