Change is inevitable. I have heard this phrase many times, but I never realized I could choose what to change about myself.
I used to cut myself off from my emotions. It was safer that way.
I originally intended Arlinda's biography to show what a cancer patient might go through during treatment. Arlinda was very new at this, and every doctor's visit caught her off-guard.
I'm excited. I can barely keep my thoughts together to write this post. My final edit is coming back on Saturday.
The next step is to get Advance Reader Copies out for professional and public reviews.
Here is another section that pained me to cut. I wanted to include the dog as a symbol of hope, but I could not quite get it to fit with the arc of the narrative.
Is “whom” old-fashioned? Stodgy? Is Stodgy considered stodgy?
When an editor and high school friend used “who” instead of “whom” on social media and I corrected her, she doubled-down on ignorance.
In Alabama, she was simply Lynn. A sharecropper’s granddaughter, riding her grandaddy’s plow, calling hogs, learning the ways of Jim Crow. Lynn was small and simple. But at eleven, she left that girl behind.
There is an 11-year gap in Arlinda's biography. The gap is not in her story directly, it is in my telling it.
Arlinda’s life was steeped in music. She was a teenager in 1960s Cleveland, the home of the weekly hit-parade Upbeat television show, where she was a professional dancer.
In documenting Arlinda's medical journey, there were many times that bureaucracy got in the way of her care. It was frustrating and harrowing for us.
Another excerpt that has been severely chopped. The whole discourse on the ramifications for/against medical-assisted suicide takes the reader out of scene:
Arlinda told me wild tales about her time touring with Rare Earth. She narrated to me about her role as stage dancer. However a relative of one of the band members does not recall them having stage dancers.
In writing Arlinda’s book I had wanted to insert the doctors’ notes into the chronicling of her medical experience.