A momentous day...

I just got through the first pass of my edit of The Drumming -- notes on the hard copy at this stage. 

My mother was a good writer, and so my editing job is relatively simple. I think there are some structural and even tonal issues with the manuscript that need to be worked out, and I am wrestling with how much to change. (She was the one with a dozen published titles, after all!) More on that struggle in a future post.

As I was reading (and it's not the first time I have read this material), I shed tears more than once.

Yes, the author is my (dead) mother and, yes, I miss her more than ever. 

(There were several times when I was reading the manuscript that I heard my mother's voice, and even times when I felt that she was speaking directly to me.)

But there is more to it.  There is a poignancy that goes beyond the family affiliation. 

I was filled with the sense of one individual's small footprint in a much larger story (India on the cusp of Independence, a world on the brink of a World War) and how these two streams so often intersect, even when an individual is not a "player" in world events. 

As I work through the physical edit, I will be posting some shorter excerpts and preparing longer ones for download over the next couple of weeks.  (Email me or subscribe to this blog if you want a heads up when new content is available.)