Frankenstein Sundae, 359 (and FINAL!)

Three-hundred fifty-nine posts on this topic!?!?  A bit depressing, eh?

Here was the idea, back at the beginning: I would begin to write a book about my decade-long pursuit of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. I would start at the restaurant in Castle Frankenstein, near Darmstadt, Germany, above the Rhine River. I would be eating a luscious sundae (this I actually did in 1999). And I would let that experience "kick off" and conclude the book.

And so I began, back on April 28, 2014 (link to that initial post).

And on and on it went. And on and on. I repeated stories I'd told earlier. I lost track of what I'd already said. I frequently drifted away from the tale of the pursuit to the tale of the pursued. I sailed down insignificant tributaries and described their ... wonders. I ignored Truths staring me in the face and waving wildly to be noticed.

And on and on.

I just looked: The full text is now 582 pages. That's a bit much, don't you think?

And now begins the hard part: pruning a tree so umbrageous that I cannot even see where its circumference begins to bend.

So ... just a touch of self-defense here. By the time I began this project, I was pretty much "done" with Mary Shelley. I had done all the traveling, the research, the reading. I had gone back to teaching at Western Reserve Academy; I had published to Kindle Direct a YA biography of her (The Mother of the Monster); I had been obsessing over other writers (Poe and John O'Hara among them); the details of her story--details I had once known so well, details that my brain once could provide with a mere flicker of my interest--were falling from me like October leaves.

And so part of this project was to get it back--an impossibility, I learned. When I was working on Mary Shelley, I was pretty much doing it all day, every day. But when I started doing Frankenstein Sundae, it was a few hours a week. If that.

Still, I was able to recover a lot. I thanked my younger self for taking good notes. For organizing and filing so that I could (usually) find things I needed--and things that I didn't even know that I needed because I'd forgotten they existed.

I read some newer books. Read some earlier ones I should have read. Went a few relevant places.

And now ... here I am. I will now begin that fierce pruning I mentioned ...

And in this space?

Well, earlier, I'd serialized here the drafts of the first two books in a little YA trilogy--The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein. I have notes for the 3rd and concluding volume, but I've not written a paragraph yet. That I will soon remedy. And I will begin posting installments here a few times a week.

Or so I hope.

And hope, you know, is merely a synonym for writing.