Morning People: Reality That Happened, or Not.
Recently, I released my second memoir, ‘Morning People’. It was a long, and even a hard process. But it’s published now, and I say, out loud and proud that the book exists on CreateSpace and Amazon. Although I haven’t had the chance to order it myself yet, a couple of friends were kind enough to purchase it and support me. Independent artists need support more than anything else you may think of.
The idea of this book started when I first moved to the city, to live with my friends, to experience life in a massive gigantic city, to give myself the opportunity to grow and learn. I was still working on my first memoir, ‘That Year’, which was the story of one year of my life in my apartment, how I gradually got to know my flat. I also talked about incidents and funny misfortunes that happened throughout that one year of my life. Just as the life in the endless city began, I started to notice how different it was all going to be. And I felt the urge, and craved writing. And so I wrote. I was a bit busy at the time, so I took my notes and pictures. They were sometimes drops of reminders to take me to the past.
I will be honest with you. Never thought it would be so difficult and energy consuming by the end. Had published one book so far, and I assumed I know about writing a book. This was a whole other experience, I really didn’t know. I was out of my town, and now were living in the city. One step closer to the future. Thoughts were more complicated, so was the life. Busy with nothing, I managed to write my first draft while I was still living there.
Anyway, it was different. Maybe it got so complicated toward the end since I cared about this project so much. Maybe I cared about my city so much that thinking about the changes it was going through simply hurt. But, let’s face it, writing a book is difficult. It needs pure concentration and patience, the power to go through all the ups and downs. It takes a lot to finish the damn thing. No matter how much you love the idea you’re working on. Another lesson to be learned.
So, there I was, living in the city. I started to take notes of heaps of incidents that happened around me, or to me. Observed the twisted beauties all around; they were bitter sometimes. Random stuff that seemed unimportant, but gained meaning when seen in the perspective of the future. We were surrounded by bad news, and the stormy political rain pouring in the area was not settling down for good. Impossible to ignore the ugly truth.
‘That Year’ was released in December.15, and I could now concentrate fully on my upcoming projects. I hand-wrote the first two drafts with a pencil, and wrote another draft with a pen. I read through my drafts, decided that it was the time to type it up. I actually followed Mr. Least Heat-Moon’s advice–thanks to his strong lectures and a bunch of videos I watched online. I typed the book two times from the top, and edited one more time. It seems unnecessary, but the words and phrases changed every time I wrote them down. Evolved, I used to happily think. I didn’t know about the others, the context, of course, sounded better to me.
Everything was going well until I reached the third edit. I had read it for about ten times already that every sentence seemed so boring, meaningless, and maybe even ugly. Self-publishing has its own downsides, and having to edit the book thoroughly all by yourself is one of them. You may get fed up by your own writing after a while, and reading it over and over again might make it worse. Give yourself a break, my friends said to me kindly. I, of course, took breaks in between the edits. A couple of days, not so long; I couldn’t waste time either. It’s a memoir, and moments pass. There remained the last part of the process that had to be done.
Oh, well, Morning People is out. Good or bad, I am not to tell. Two weeks have passed the date, and I’ve had my break. Reading my book again and hearing feedback from family and friends, I can say I’m cool with it. Very glad I went through all the boring days, to be finally relieved that all my effort and hard work were not a waste.
The book was the first part of this memoir project, and I can now get on with the rest of it. Next comes the animation, The Street, would be pretty much related to the book. I can tell you about it later.
Here‘s a link to the book if you’d like to check it out.