Frankenstein Sundae: An Update

Visitors to this site know that for a couple of years (years!) I serialized here a messy, overlong memoir, Frankenstein Sundae, about my long pursuit of Mary Shelley, a pursuit that commenced in the mid-1990s (when I was still teaching 8th grade English) and that terminated ... well ... not yet.

Anyway, I have been editing/cutting/clarifying like a madman and just yesterday printed out the second draft (a mere 500 pages) and today will begin more cutting/clarifying/etc. I hope in the next couple of months to have a version good enough to upload to Kindle Direct so that my friends, family members, and others can begin lying about how they purchased it, loved it (Pulitzer-worthy, etc.).

One of the things that's hard to keep track of when you're serializing is repetition. I've been finding in my revising that I told the same story over and over again. (Dickens and Collins and Trollope never had this problem ... why did/do I? And please don't answer that question!)

Another serialization issue I had to deal with: the sort of remember-what-I-wrote-last-time? sentences and paragraphs--stuff I wrote because I could not assume that a reader remembered on Friday what I had posted on Monday. So ... all of that stuff had to go, too.

And, of course, where I read through the text, there were all kinds of things that emitted the aroma of Who cares?--stuff, in other words, that at one point had interested me but would not likely interest anyone else, save another Mary Shelley nerd.

Some things I just deleted; some, I banished to the endnotes; some, I stuck in an appendix (I now have five--in my book, not in my body). For example, I've got some interesting stuff about Lord Byron and his wife and daughter--but it's a little ... digressive (to say the least). So ... Byron nerds can check it out, if they want, but it won't clutter the otherwise compelling (???) narrative (!!!).

So, anyway, this afternoon--at the coffee shop--I will start on the title page and begin my slow journey once again.

And at some point? In the spring! (?) I will post something here about how it's now available on Amazon, and you can all jam the Amazon servers with your purchases.

I forgot the definition of megalomania ... can anyone remind me?