April is bee season in Moshav Beit Zayit. The little black and yellow furry things with wings are busy sucking the nectar from our obese pink roses.
Whenever a bee buzzes near me, I run the other way, but I understand that as an author with a new book I will have to create a buzz. Not to worry. My new book is neither completed, nor has it found a home. Nonetheless, I have to work myself up to creating a buzz, a mode of communication that does not come naturally.
One can’t launch a buzz until one has a title copyrighted and settled.
I’ve narrowed down the list of twenty-four possible titles to two: Possibility One: The Mourning After: A Hybrid Memoir of Delayed Grief . Possibility Two: The Kitchen Sink: A  Hybrid Memoir of Delayed Grief. I’ve copyrighted both names, just in case this post reaches the eyes and ears of a writer who wants to steal one of them. I don’t think anyone would want to steal one of these names, though, since writing a hybrid memoir about delayed grief could take you forty years. I’m sure you have better things to do with your time.

I know it could take forty years because that’s about how long it’s taken me to reach this  current version. Each decade I rewrote it, but this decade’s revision seems to be the best. I forced myself to listen only to my still, small voice and focus  on the story.

You won’t learn much about Jerusalem’s history  or the Cuyahoga River from my memoir. Pick up my book (in 2015 or after) only if you’re interested in one woman’s experience with delayed grief. You’ll see how an information vacuum  causes the imagination to go berserk. You’ll also laugh a little, because it’s important to laugh when a book deals with grief.

During my current revision I mention  a gun in Part One. Maybe by the time my book is published (I’m feeling confident it will find a small publisher who adores the hybrid memoir, some starving person between Buffalo and Taos.) the gun will go off in Part III. I too can’t wait to see how I figure that one out. It’s a memoir, after all.
The main difference between this version of my memoir and versions from the eighties, nineties and the first decade of this century is that then I was an emerging writer and now I am a mature writer. At a workshop in Wales in 1990 or so, a published writer told me, “Judy, you’re trying to do something very difficult.” This was her way of saying, It doesn’t work. She was right. But now, as a mature writer and a teacher, no less, now I can handle the difficulties and even enjoy them.

Is this enough of a buzz?  Are you waiting breathlessly for me to finish the effing book so I can find a publisher and you can download it onto your Kindle or buy the paper version for your nightstand? I am. Meanwhile, I shall buzz. Better I should get sick of the buzzing than of the book.