It is coming up to three months since my beloved daughter died suddenly and unexpectedly. Inside my body my heart is ripping apart but the emotions it is trying to display are masked, hidden and are being prevents from outworking themselves. I have not cried, I want to cry but I can not cry.
In memory and in honour of my daughter I am running OurRebekah but the project has taken over my life. I am spending most of my day either at the laptop or out attending meetings as I set up activities within OuRebekah. When things are going well I am on a high, I am on top of the world. When things do not go as I want I become angry and frustrated. Rebekah was at the centre of my life, since childhood her illness had put her there, I have replaced her with OurRebekah.
If you were to read through all of these diary entries going back to April you will see how much I have changed. That change is not for the good. The balance in my life has disappeared. I am obsessed with the project I am running for Beck. If I do not step back and change things that project could well fail. I have got to restructure my life and restore a balance.
I have stopped writing. Diary entries here have become few, one a week on average. I just have not had time to write any more in my story The Bridge House. I have made the excuse that I will not now edit the draft text in each chapter as I go along but will work through the whole book when it is finished. Will I ? Chapter One has 22,982 words. Chapter Two has 17,789 words. So far there are 14,879words in Chapter Three. That's a word total of 55,560 words, about half way towards finishing the story. How many typos are there in all that ? I would estimate about five hundred, could be more. If anyone were to read the text in its present form they would give up within the first few pages. Printed out on to A4 paper there are 164 pages.
Yesterday I made a promise. I am opening my heart a bit with this diary entry and sharing my promise so by telling lots of people I have to keep it ! I promise to write at least five hundred words for The Bridge House every day. Yesterday I sat out in the sunshine and scribbled into my notebook what I think will be about six hundred words once they are typed up and added to the story. No matter what the circumstances I will keep my promise and write something, five hundred words, every day.
Probably on Wednesday I will dig very deep into my pocket to buy a new black ink cartridge for my printer and a pack of paper the print off all of The Bridge House text. I will go through this, correct the errors on the paper then work through the on-line text. I am not sure how long that will take but it will be done.
Chapter One ends abruptly. It does so for no other reason than I did not want to go through cliché after cliché describing the sinking of RMS Titanic. Chapter Two does not have quite so abrupt an ending but it does leave some lose ends. It had been my thinking that when Chapter Three reached its end everything would conclude to allow Lily to move on into the next stage of her life. I am going to end that chapter very abruptly. There will be some things which will be picked up in Chapter Four but Chapter Three will have a sudden ending. That ending will be the death of Lily's son Billy.
Lily was my grandmother. The Bridge House is partly the story of her life although there is a thick wrapping of my author's imagination surrounding it all. In telling the story I am not simply writing a biography of my grandmother, I am not just trying to relate the events she lived through. What I want to do is to help the reader understand what it was like to have lived during the years my grandmother was alive.
The original idea for the story, an idea I came up with in the early weeks of this year, would see it end early in 1983 when my daughter Rebekah was born. Lily lived to the age of 94 and died a year later. That is no longer going to be the way the story ends. I do not want to tell you how it ends but all of the chapter endings will be brought together in the book's conclusion and will make complete sense as my style of writing and chapter endings will become apparent.
Disciplining myself to devote time each day to my writing, both with The Bridge House and here with my diary will, in part, help me put a better balance in my life. As the days progress and more diary entries are written you will see if this plan is working or not.
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