Getting to Work

It is totally shocking that I’ve been procrastinating getting back to work on my memoir. It’s not like there is anything better to do.

Today I started with a small piece of editing. The task has been languishing on my to-do list and now it’s done. I decided to work on Part II, which is my life after university and military service, beginning the summer of 1981.

After graduate school, I took a trip, found a job, and met my future spouse. I wanted to stay in Iowa and Johnson County is an oasis in a cultural desert of corn, soybeans, hay, oats, hogs, cattle, and sheep which was and remains Iowa. I had no interest in returning to my home town of Davenport. There was really no other place to live in Iowa, I reckoned. The challenge today is memory and artifacts from the second part of my life are too numerous to mention them all in a book. I don’t relish going through everything to cull items for the narrative. Hence the procrastination.

I worked as an admissions clerk at the University of Iowa Dental Clinic after graduate school. We saw patients from all around Iowa — wealthy patients with private insurance, indigents with limited means, and everyone in between. Anyone who came to my desk was accepted for treatment. The exposure to people from diverse backgrounds was inspiring. In 1981 I didn’t worry about much beyond getting to work on time, learning what I could about people, and doing my best.

Outside my admissions work I put hours and hours into researching and writing fiction. I developed a couple of frameworks, read lots of books, and viewed countless movies. Somehow I failed to realize that writing means producing a certain number of words on a regular basis. I know that now and thus far produced about 127,000 words of an autobiography. All the same, I’ve been avoiding the big task of culling things into a viable narrative. I feel there are one, maybe two chances to go through everything while I’m alive. I want to gain what insights I can and get the story right.

I wrote a task for tomorrow: read the next 100 pages of the draft and take notes. This will lead to updating the outline and help identify where the narrative devolves into a series of snippets from journals and cut and paste paragraphs. The best way to get going is take one step each day and make sure it gets done. I don’t know any other way to get started, and time’s a wasting. This is what I mean by it’s time to get to work.