Hi ,

As I mentioned in my last email, I'm writing the first draft of this memoir by hand—and really enjoying it. I'm in a writing course/coaching group (The Book Incubator), and they provided me with four notebooks. Each 100-page notebook is meant to be long enough to fit 1/4 of an average-length book with average-size handwriting. I'm following a flexible, four-part outline I wrote before I started drafting the book itself.

The problem is, I got to the end of Notebook 1, and I hadn't hit the 25% mark in my outline yet. (I tend to write long on a first draft!) I bought an "overflow notebook" that's long enough to take plenty of extra words for all four notebooks, in case I go over again (and again and again). Sixteen pages into my overflow notebook, I came to the point I'd established as the 25%(ish) mark of my memoir.

I went ahead and opened Notebook 2 (the red-and-pink one in this pic) and wrote the first three sentences in it. I can't wait to get back to the story tomorrow.

I'm calling Part 1 of the book "Survival." It's about the first six months of Jason's diagnosis, when we were both trying (in very different ways) to come to terms with all the news we were getting. There's a lot of hard, gut-level honesty here—it's full of emotions and thoughts I wasn't free to share publicly at the time. But there's humor and joy too.

Part 2/Notebook 2 is currently called "Living." It'll cover the second six months of Jason's illness, when we both really started learning to enjoy the time we had together ... even as life continued to hit us with some very, very hard circumstances.

Thank you again for your support as I work on this project—and as I go through this time of grief. I'm doing well overall, and getting back to writing has definitely been helping.

With love,

Beth