From Panic Attacks to Selling My Memoir

For over ten years I’ve been writing, revising, searching for agents, working with editors and finally selling my book about a childhood trauma: my parents were severely burned in an accident on Cape Cod when I was four years old.

This blog will be of interest to those who have been through an early trauma and suffered from panic attacks—in my case decades later-- and also to those who have spent seconds, hours, days, months and yes, many years trying to bring a book to publication.

This very beginning—testing the waters—will be an attempt to combine the two threads. So I will start by just saying that my book Burned: A Memoir was sold to Atlas and Company and will be published in April of 2010. Making that statement represents years of sitting in front of the computer between my teaching job and raising kids –and my determination that the book would get good enough to be sold. The fact that it did sell also represents love of family and friends—a good dose of luck-- and what I learned about navigating through the publishing world.

So as I said—this is just a beginning—and as the weeks go on I will continue to write about the past (overcoming the panic attacks that ttriggered the writing), how I wrote and rewrote the book and perhaps how I would approach this differently(hindsight). The present and the future all converge to this very moment. My children are now grown—my parents have died—and my sister, six at the time of the accident lives in the Virgin Islands, returning to the sand and the sea—where we had such beautiful and such terrible memories.