THE BOOK'S PROGREES AND A BRIEF STORY BEHIND IT

 

It’s been a long journey, but it’s almost at its end. I’m not referring to my life—hopefully, I have many more years ahead—but rather to my memoir, a project I started over 17 years ago. While I’ve scrapped earlier versions and started from scratch more than once, this version feels final. The only step left is to have an editor review it, ensuring it’s ready for publication.

Writing this book has been a journey of personal growth, not just in terms of age and wisdom, but also in my writing skills and my acceptance of the life I was given. The biggest challenge was stepping aside and becoming the writer, not the child or young man reliving the pain. By doing that, I became the observer, able to decide what served the story and what didn’t. It’s tempting to say everything, but I made a rule: don’t be the boy who cries wolf.  What I’m saying is, once you get your message across, move on.  Otherwise, you’ve saturated your book with repetitive situations that eventually become diluted to the reader.

When I first started, the tools available to writers were far more limited than they are today. There was no Grammarly, no ChatGPT, no AI assistance. I worked with WordPerfect, Spell Check, and a Thesaurus—tools I thought were more than enough at the time. I believed the first draft needed to be untouched by anything external, written purely from the heart, the pain, the anger, the love, and the sadness. It didn’t matter if it was messy, filled with run-on sentences and misspellings, because the goal was to get the story down on paper.

That draft was something only I could fully understand because I knew the meaning behind every sentence and chapter. If the memoir was meant for my eyes alone, it would have stayed that way, but it wasn’t. So, I began revising. Draft two became draft three, and so on. Eventually, Grammarly came into the picture, and I started over. Then, ChatGPT arrived, and once again, I began anew. Yet, through all those revisions, everything still started with that raw first draft—the one I wrote on my own.

What I’ve learned through this process is simple: if you feel like writing your story, just write it. Don’t worry about how polished it is at first. Get the emotions, the thoughts, the ideas on paper. There will always be time to clean it up later, but the heart of your story needs to come first.

As I reflect on this long process, the title The Gingerbread House on LaCollina Drive feels fitting. Like the house in a fairy tale, my life seemed inviting on the surface, but it was filled with challenges and deeper layers that took years to truly understand. Early next year, readers will have the chance to see this journey—one of overcoming obstacles, finding validation, and discovering myself. It’s a story about having everything and nothing at the same time. About not judging a book by its cover, or a house by its exterior, because you may never see the gem inside—or the cage behind the door.