Getting Closer ...

Pic shows Castle Frankenstein--near
Darmstadt, Germany--
April 29, 1999,
the day I visited

I'm getting closer now to Frankenstein Sundae day--the day I upload to Kindle Direct the memoir I serialized here for several years, the memoir about getting obsessed about Mary Shelley and her famous novel, the memoir about chasing her all over the place, chasing her family members and friends and ... it seemed endless.

I thought I was ready about a week ago, then realized I wasn't--and needed to put the whole text through yet another round of editing (by me).

There were some problems--some questions:

• Repetition. Because I had serialized the memoir on this site (and because I had done so over a period of years), I could not assume, as I was serializing, that readers would remember, say, something I had alluded to six months earlier. So ... lots of repetition in the blog posts (there were, by the way, 358 of them; I was posting on M-W-F, though not religiously so).
• Information. How much I is TMI, you know? I could not assume that readers would know much about Mary and her world (I certainly didn't when I began the project back in the early 1990s), but how much should I tell as I went along? How much was necessary? How much was interesting only to me? How much was not a river but a swamp?
• Digressions. Oh, am I susceptible to these! One thing reminds me of another. I'm writing along about MaryWorld, and the next thing I know, I’m talking about a boyhood home in Amarillo, Texas, in 1952--which, by the way, is almost exactly a century after Mary died (1851). (See what I mean?) Sometimes, I know, these detours can be enlightening--even, maybe, a relief from the rest of the text--but they can also be, well, dispiriting, can cause a reader to wonder: What in the hell is this book even about?
• The Impossibility of Keeping Up. New books and articles and information were appearing all the time as I worked--and films. This year alone (2018) there has been a Niagara of publication because of the 200th anniversary of the original publication of Frankenstein. 
• I tried to keep up--and couldn't, of course. But I did try to read the most important new works--see the films--read the essays and reviews.
• As a character says of an inept TV announcer in Kurt Vonnegut's great story "Harrison Bergeron": "He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him." (Link to online text of the story.) Sometimes, I realized (all too often) that God didn't give me enough ... (Always nice to be able to blame a deity for one's own shortcomings!)

So ... I'd say in a couple of weeks I'll upload the thing, knowing quite well that I'll wish I'd edited yet another time (or twenty). This time, by the way, I'm editing digitally only; previous times, I've printed the Whole Damn Thing and worked with a pencil. Not this time. This time I am contemporary!