There are as many reasons as there are people, I guess. I’m most curious about why writers do. Why should any writer read another writer’s book? Well, I can only say why I do, and it’s because I have loved reading ever since I learned how, at age five and a half. A lot of writers will tell you the same scenario. “When I first learned how to read, I was so wowed by the miracle of it, I wanted to write words and poems and stories too.” At five or six, we are totally unaffected by any fear or even clue that this might not be possible. At this stage, everything is.
But most of us grow up and do something else. Business, art, music, science, mathematics, astronomy, politics, or children. And the option slips away into subconscious unspecified daydreaming for 30 or 40 or 50 years, till something happens that brings it out into the light again. That’s what I did, I thought.
I retired, and when I began to write, I discovered to my utter surprise that I had been writing (in the closet) for decades. On-the-side in journals for no reason I would confess to, and I had built up a mass of work that could potentially be harvested, gleaned,, reconsidered, rewritten and might even become a meaningful story that could in fact share what a genuine nonfictional human life is like, as they say, “warts and all.”
Those first drafts were often angry, tragic, self-pitying, emotional, and very unlovely. Good. The life-blood was still virulent in them. Saner perhaps kinder drafts could be created out of the raw open flesh of them, their wounds, their rages, and their sorrows. Something could emerge that might show those experiences, for someone else to have compassion for their own flaws and failures and come to forgive themselves for their own sincere mistakes.
At the start, I thought the book was being written for me, about me, to grapple with the devils and angels in my own soul. But pretty soon an unconfessed, denied and hidden urgency of a lifetime emerged: the body-and-soul disconnect between by biological mother and myself. But the story would turn out to be even bigger. I soon discovered it was not so much about myself or my problems, successes or defeats, as it was about the equally imperfect but decent people whose lives paralleled, intersected, and either connected or failed to connect, with mine. People I never really saw until now, looking back from a distance like a disembodied spiritual voyeur, from above and beyond it now.
And I didn’t realize until a few years into the book, that I was only the honest observer, the storyteller, only one part of many complex human entanglements. The stories of a “dysfunctional” family, imperfect loves, and an inexplicable life-event that on one ordinary day could alter all the lives of a whole family and more, forever, and would become “the family secret” that everybody knew but denied, always hid, and never talked about. In the last chapter when I realized the family secret, it changed the perspective and revealed the truth of everything else that had ever been.
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Of the trilogy, Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames.
If you are interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress., please contact me through “Victory” at Darkhorse Press. Thank you.
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Victory Is My Name, a Memoir – Book One: The Burning Barrel
E-book available now, paperback available Sept.21, 2020
more information, http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html
Posted by Victoria C. 
writertowriter 