Giving Birth to a Book - A New Writer's Diary

Today is the first Monday in a long time that I didn't wake up with work to do in my book. Well, writing work, at least.  After years of working on the manuscript of my spiritual memoir, Beyond Sunday: God's Patient Pursuit of My Soul, it is finally in the hands of my copy editor. Well, it will arrive there tomorrow.

Birthing a book involves much waiting and as many phases and checkpoints as birthing a baby. A book's cells are its words. Unlike a human baby, a book does not multiply, divide and organize its cells as it grows.  The author must do this consciously, with ever-evolving decisions. The author's mind becomes the placenta that forms around the embryo or book.  The writer's mind, through which all nutrition for the developing book will pass, allows ideas, feelings, and images to exchange as words, characters, scenes, and chapters. Some grow as it develops, others get deleted as waste.

During the embryo's second week, a group of cells separates to develop into the amnion, the membrane that will surround the fetus to form the embryonic sac. This fluid-filled sac helps to cushion the fetus during later development.  A writer must create his or her cushion of protection and isolation during the book's development. It is not automatic. This cushion is a challenge because of the book's invisibility at this stage and for many stages to come. A writer receives nutrients during ordinary moments in life. The words multiply on the page only when the writer makes a meal of those nutrients with paper and pen, laptop, or other electronic devices.

To be continued...

Inspiration and a Future of Hope and Light for All.

On this date, we remember Bishop Juan Gerardi.

The Recovery of Historical Memory. That's the name of the project Bishop Juan Gerardi, auxiliary bishop of Guatemala City, created to investigate the military's human rights abuses that caused the destruction of over 400 Indian villages.

When I lived in River Forest, Illinois in the 1980's, our parish played a small part in the sanctuary movement, providing support, shelter and transportation to a Guatemalan family escaping the horrific military violence in their country. My Spanish was not that good, but I will always remember their eyes.

By 1996, the United Nations brokered an end to thirty-six years of civil war in Guatemala.  The peace agreement called for an investigation of human rights abuses.  Bishop Juan Gerardi, auxiliary bishop of Guatemala City,  headed the archdiocesan office of human rights. His Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) project conducted an exhaustive investigation.

Two years later, he presented the findings in a 1,400-page work, Guatemala: Never Again! It outlined four decades of assassination, torture, and massacres, including the death of hundreds of lay catechists. (I've been a catechist a third of my life.) The conclusion of his report pointed to the Guatemalan military being responsible for almost 90 percent of  200,000 noncombatant deaths and disappearances.

"We are collecting the people's memories," Bishop Gerardi reported, "because we want to contribute to the construction of a different country. This path was and continues to be full of risks, but the construction of the Kingdom of God entails risks, and only those who have the strength to confront these risks can be its builders."

Two days later, on April 26, 1998, military assassins ambushed Bishop Gerardi in his home. They smashed in his skull with a slab of cement.

The older I get, the more relevant history becomes to me. The United States of America could use a similar project (there probably already is one) to recover our memories of our own human rights abuses toward Native Americans and those we now call African Americans who had no interest in leaving their native country, homesteads, family, or friends when they were captured, kidnapped, sold, or exiled in our land almost four hundred years ago.

May I have the strength of good Bishop Juan to speak Truth to injustices, intolerances, racial jokes and atrocities. Opportunities, unfortunately, are plentiful.

"Years of terror and death have reduced the majority (of Guatemalans)

to fear and silence. Truth is the primary word that makes it possible

for us to break this cycle of death and violence

and to open ourselves to a future of hope and light for all."

Bishop Juan Gerardi

source: Give Us This Day, Daily Prayer for Today's Catholic, April 2016
#kidnapped #juangerardi #RecoveryOfHistoricalMemory #chrismanion #assasin #Guatemala 

Lesson from a Pruned Bush

From my Retirement Collection of Poems

Pruned Bush

by Chris Manion

Sometimes, every now and then,

it's helpful to stop, 

cut way back on

activities

words

processed foods

visual input

and simply rest.

The severely pruned bush reminded me of this.

It had been so full and well, bushy.

Now it was angular, mutated,

kind of ugly if truth be told.

It had been allowed to reach out into sidewalk space,

overgrowing its boundaries,

pressing passers-by to the outer edge of the pavement.

We walk around overgrown objects, thoughts, attitudes

for years

sometimes decades

barely aware we allow them to edge us out

of our true self

of a happy life.

I Chose Joy: A Reflection on Biking and a Good Ride

I saw bikers this morning, probably twenty of them riding in close formation down Sandestin Boulevard. I was heading south to Mass when they rolled out of the turn-about heading north. The flash of their colorful jerseys, helmets, and pedaling legs caused my heart to race.

image source: www.real-world-physics-problems.com

As emotions clutched my gut and closed my throat, I lifted my hand off the steering wheel in greeting. The lead biker in the peloton waved back as they rode past.

My father loved to bike. He did so several times a week, both in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and in Phoenix where he moved in retirement. He earned a gold medal in the El Tour de Phoenix Senior Olympics race in April 1998.

His jersey, hat, riding gloves and medal from that race hang on my office wall. A year later, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given six-to-nine months to live.

Moving the sad emotion out of the way, I reclaimed the joy of knowing that he and mom are enjoying eternal life with Our Lord, Jesus. Both visited me in unique ways shortly after their deaths, bringing great peace and joy as their final gift to me. The depth of their happiness was immediately apparent but unimaginable, exceeding anything our human bodies can experience.

I chose to match my emotions to the faith strong and sure within me. Acting on that faith, I denied the shadow of sorrow that tried to darken the joy my heart knows about the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. I will continue to choose joy instead of sadness, and life over death, just as my father did. He lived ten years after his diagnosis.

He knew how to have a good ride.

Second Wind

Runners talk about gaining a second wind somewhere during their run.  I'll probably never experience this. I have no desire to run. A heel spur and Achilles tendonitis give me all the excuses I need if I ever decide to change my mind.

I don't know how many times I've edited my spiritual memoir. It doesn't matter really. I never count things that really matter but pursue, persist, and persevere until I accomplish what needs to be done to achieve excellence, to heal, to grow. It's been a slow process. Being a burgeoning writer, I'm pretty sure it's always going to be a slow process. Creative juices have their own ebb and flow to their tide. Each writer observes and walks his or her own beach to learn and breathe its salty air.

Something happened last week that surprised me. I printed out a copy of my manuscript to send to a beta reader. As it sat on my desk to be mailed, I started to page through it to see how the latest version looked on the page. Before I knew it, I was in another line edit.  I'd already sent the MS to my developmental editor. I thought I was done for the moment until I got her feedback. Wrong.

Clarity blew in like a storm out of nowhere. I read through page after page in high adrenaline mode, marking corrections, finding new ways to clean up sentences, avoiding duplicate descriptions as if my life depended on it. If I knew what an upper felt like, I might have been experiencing something like its effects.

Maybe the work was so clean finally, the edits came more easily. Maybe this is what it feels like to be close to a finish line in a race. Who knows? The thrill of this line edit is a new exhilaration for me on my writer's beach and I'm staying with it '

til the sun sets.