I read the dinosaur blog post at an open mic reading in the library last night. They liked it; there were satisfying murmurs and several bouts of laughter as well as a nice round of applause when I was done. I started off by saying I’d joined a workshop and had been doing readings for my novel but I now find myself more involved with memoir work. In fact, because of the time limit at most of the open mic sessions I’ve been to recently, usually I read from the blog. My Zippy the Roller-skating Chimpanzee post and the one about John Lennon were so well received that I read them together at the presentation the workshop did for Valentine’s Day. I’ve read the first chapter of the novel twice now, each time led to revisions, but the feedback I'm getting from both the other writers in the group and the audiences is that the memoir work is much better than my fiction. 

I’m enough, my history is enough, but what to do about this novel? When I first joined the workshop last fall and began blogging again, I was in love with my characters. I’ve been living with them since before I left New York, they’re my friends, I know them. I was dedicated to their stories and bringing them to life, but I wasn’t ready yet, I didn’t have the extra cash to copyright it before sending it to agents much less out into the ether. I am ready now; I have enough money, a webpage, a blog, and an acceptable following under my pen name on Facebook and Twitter. I intend go forward with the copyright registration, and once that’s in place, I’ll start contacting agents with my query and elevator speech synopsis, and the first chapter if appropriate. But it’s the memoir work that has my attention. Hopefully I can do both; the job of selling a finished product I love but have let go of, and this new, more truthful peeling back process. It’s actually not new; I wrote a memoir at forty-five and another about a specific event when I was sixty. Neither went anywhere, but they are excellent source material for what I’m doing now, and in each case, basically all that is required is minor editing and stylistic revisions so they have the same voice. 

I turned sixty-five last weekend, we had giant chunks of ice wash ashore in the harbor yesterday, perhaps now is as good a time as any to combine those two memoirs into one cohesive piece; if not for you, the public, then at least for me.