Book on IVF

[Samsara]

Excellent Junior. I wish you the best in this endeavor!


Samsara

[Junior]

That is very good news, Junior! Another proof that we need to stay patient, yet not give up. :) When the readers will be reading your book, will they be able to feel the Australian accent?

LOL No worries mate

[Junior]

Excellent Junior. I wish you the best in this endeavor!


Samsara

Thanks Samsara.

It's good to see you posting on the board again too

[Luc]

...

[Samsara]

Thanks Samsara.

It's good to see you posting on the board again too

Thank you Junior although I likely won't be posting much for some time to come. In the meantime, keep on with the editing process. :)


Sam

[Sheila]

Once again, Junior, you’ve done an exceptionally good job of rolling with the punches, and being cleverly pragmatic. It is a great idea to move the project forward in this way. Onwards!

[Junior]

Attachment 139...

lol!!!!

[Junior]

Wow. Has it really been that long since I posted in here? I know I've had a hectic time of things over the past 9 months or so but wow.....

Ok.. so... nothing was happening so I asked my agent if it would speed up the process if I paid an editor as I know he wanted to edit my manuscript (ms) but simply hadn't had the time. He thought it was a good idea and put me on to someone who has had over 38 years of experience and is considered 'top of her tree' - in other words, she has been top of her field. She is 62 and works freelance now as she is moving into doing Palliative Care Counselling. When I entered into this with her I never dreamed it would take so long. How naive I was! But I have learned a lot from her. She even said, recently, that my writing of the last chapter (more on that in a minute) is 'excellent'.

So... I had 12 chapters to start with. I had written a straight narrative of the events and put in what I called "my IVF feelings", that is, the raw emotion. When I am not coping with something in life, I grab pen and paper and just let it flow. It has always been my way. As it happened I kept everything I'd written during the 4.5 yrs of doing IVF and dated them, so I was able to go through and pick out the salient bits. The first thing my editor did was to turn the raw emotion into diary entries, although we have now decided to get rid of the dates and just keep the 'voice' in the present while the straight narrative is past tense. This all happened in the latter half of the 90s and makes it all look a bit dated. She then set about helping me to tighten things. Because of my academic training I tend to write long paragraphs. She has changed that into short, punchy ones and I now see the style she was looking for. The rest of her work is about tidying things up and getting rid of repetition. I have always been verbose (uni has helped me with that!) but didn't realise how repetitive I was.

Finally, she felt I needed to write something "personal and winning" to round off the story. My first attempt -about 3 months ago - was no good and I was very disheartened. I had, as she said, fallen back into my 'safe' mode of writing in a narrative style. She thought I was probably being fiercely protective of my 'self' and I think she was right. So with her guidance, I set about looking at the whole thing through the lens of grief. It was hard. I went back through the entire ms and picked out the specific comments that pertained to grief. I then looked at grief theory and identified the stage /task of grief I appeared to be in and used that to guide what I said. I didn't talk about grief theory or even label the stage but used it to underpin my description of my emotions of the time. If that makes sense. Anyhow, it was challenging and hard because it is hard trying to get back inside what was going on for me - from a time I have largely dealt with and put behind me. But I did it! And my editor says that as a stand alone - it is excellent. We just have to fit it into the book. That will of course mean making changes but I expected that.

So that is where we are at. A tiny bit of work needed on chapters 10 and 11 - which I will be getting on with today and tomorrow - some alterations to the journal entries through the earlier chapters - and of course chapter 12. She also wants to reduce the 'instructional' tone of the earlier chapters and increase some of the stuff about my spiritual crisis. So we still have a bit of work to do but she feel it is definitely doable before I go away in just over 7 weeks time. I hope so. It's hard going over and over and over the same stuff. Not just because it was a hard journey the first time. But just because you get sick of looking at it! I felt like that when I did my 4th yr psychology thesis.

[Junior]

I have been asked to write a 'blurb' which can be used - if my agent ever finds me a publisher - on websites and stuff. It's like a precis.

This is what I wrote yesterday:

Infertility, for a woman whose very identity centred on having children, and whose only child, conceived and born naturally is disabled, was a journey through complex grief, spiritual abandon and lost identity.
Her emotional highs and lows as she negotiates the rollercoaster of seven attempts at IVF are told through the daily struggles of an ordinary woman trying to make her way through an abnormal life situation.
Eventually, emotionally paralysed and seeking help for depression she finds herself in therapy where she is masterfully guided through resolution of her grief. Central to this are the careful reconstruction of her identity and a renewed sense of life purpose.

[Sheila]

Very interesting, Junior. She sounds like a great writing coach. And it sounds like a productive relationship. It sound like your writing is just getting better and better and better. Very professional. Gripping blurb!

I’m very impressed and proud of you. This has been a big, long project, and you stuck with it, making it very high caliber. I admire people who do that!