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It seems to me that I made an important decision for myself without knowing I did it.  Looking back at this past month in my book-writing process — or rather at my non-writing process — I am coming to the conclusion tonight that I am done with my first rough draft of my first book.  This comes as a surprise to me.  I was evidently done a month ago and didn’t know it.  Tonight I know it.

I understand what the ‘stopping’ I wrote about in recent posts was about.  That is what happens when the end of a book is reached.  The story stops.  It stops wherever it stops.  “Duh, Linda!”

So, this book ends where I quit writing.  I have tried to inch my way forward over these past weeks, but that is ALL I have accomplished — a few more inches.  The book almost stops when I was 10 and was forced by my mother’s intensified abuse to run away from her.  The book actually stops a few hours after I ran away and was forced to go back home.  I had nowhere else to go.

Certainly the whole story of my life at home being abused by Mother lasted another eight years without reprieve, but I realize now that my first book truly is about my childhood — about my life as a child.  After the age of ten, as I pass my eleventh birthday and begin to move into prepuberty, then into puberty, and then into my teenage years I was no longer a child.

Those later transitions belong to another book.

Even stopping here at age 10 I now have a massive editing process to go through.  But I can understand that.  I can work with that.  What has become very clear to me is that I cannot move forward into the later time I spent being abused by Mother without first going back and making a book out of what I have discovered about my life during the first decade I lived in this body on this planet being Linda.

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