a tiny break

we have mercifully arrived at the ½ way point of our book. It’s taken us years to get this far for reasons I think I’ve spoken to before (ie, reliving the unpleasant nature of the topic, having full-time day jobs, 2 writers both w/ different styles of working etc). Another reason is that it’s a freaking labyrinth. Each memory is emotionally charged for both of us and has sub-floors and flashes of instant connotation and suggestions that create ricocheting memories held up in a mirror that make it nearly impossible to step aside and evaluate whether the book is even working on a fundamental level. Is this even interesting? Does it even make sense? These are the questions that we cannot answer.


In keeping w/ that, we’ve elected to stall the project momentarily and get some opinions. We’re going to show it to a) someone from the ‘writing world’ b) someone from the ‘brain tumor world’ and c) someone who knows us and our story but wasn’t here in portland for the nitty-gritty day-in-day-out. Hopefully some consensus, however meager, will emerge. I was home sick yesterday and took the opportunity to read what we have so far in its totality in one sitting. It was a trip, providing faint flickers of what the book might really be like but yet a slippery thing. Reading a passage will remind me of something else that happened but that isn’t in the book at all. So my interpretation is informed by something that exists in memory but not physically on the page. Follow? You see our dilemma…