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| The Author's Desk |
So here is where it all began. It began innocently enough in the fall of 2004 when I got the idea to write a short story about
a young Japanese woman who was a member of The Unification Church on a fundraising team in Chicago. Most of you reading this
may not be able to relate to what the Unification Church is or who Reverend Moon is or what a mobile fundraising team (MFT)
is but don't worry because I'm going to devote several articles in which I explain it all to you. You're going to love it.
For brevity (to make a long story short, that is) the main character, Michiko, sees a bank robbery in progress in a bank across
the street where she's been dropped off and magically transforms into the superheroine Sukahara and foils the bank robbery.
That's how the story began yet in the end I edited out that scene and created an entirely different first chapter.
That's writing for you, ideas changing and constantly in flux. Now, that happened like three years ago and I thought those
originals ideas were lost to the ether (computer lingo for deleted, trashed, Gone!) but they have since recently been
uncovered and what better way to entice you to come back to my humble web site than to announce that I will be posting the
Lost Chapters Of Tamara's Journey: The Purging Of A Tyrant. Look for it in the coming months when I have the time.
Now most authors these days use their desktop computers or laptops to write their manuscripts. Well, that's how it started
out for me too, that is until my computer up and crashed in December of 2004. It was a seven year old gateway computer with
a 166mhz processor. Can you imagine that? I knew it would die one of these days but they always seem to die at the wrong time.
This was no different.
It would be about four or five months until I got a new one so until then I had to wait. Given the fact that I always back
up my hard drive to a removable media such as a cd, the short story wasn't lost but I had lost interest in it until one morning
in January 2005 in the early morning hours just before I was supposed to take my daughter to school. As I was sitting on the
couch in my living room I was visited by the Higher Self (soul / spirit) of a woman I had known for a brief time in 1982.
She was also Japanese, whom I had been arranged in marriage by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. But she had since left the church
in 1983 (long story) and broken my heart. She is a soul whom I shared many past lives with.
She asked me to continue writing this story with her. And by doing so I could help her alleviate a deep pain within her heart.
It was the start of a very profound experience with her. So, since my computer was no longer working I got some old notebooks
that had belonged to my daughter that she used in school, tore out pages that were used and used what blank pages that were
left to write on. I got about three or four of these along with a three-ring binder that I stuffed with about three hundred
pages of looseleaf paper and began writing my manuscript by hand.
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| The Original Handwritten Manuscript |
On the left you will see a photo of this important relic of literary history. I wrote just about the entire manuscript by
hand from January until July of 2005. At the time I was studying to get my degree in Nursing at the local community college.
So when I got tired and absolutely mind numbed from reading my textbook on Microbiology I would take out my notebooks and
reams of looseleaf and continue writing my book. Actually, I didn't know it was going to be a book when I was writing it.
I was just so totally absorbed with writing chapter upon chapter in this seemingly neverending story about Michiko and her
best friend Mitsui and all of the adventures they went on that it all began to come alive right before my eyes. I wrote and
I wrote and I wrote until my hands ached and it was like two o'clock in the morning. Then I'd get up the next morning, go
to class, come back and I couldn't wait to have some free time by myself so that I could write some more.
I have a brother, Ron. Ron Kovic. (Wikipedia
article about Ron Kovic) Maybe you've heard of him. He wrote a book called Born
On The Fourth Of July back in 1973 which went on to be the basis of a movie starring Tom Cruise in 1991 of the same title
(BOTFOJ: The Movie). I talked with him once and he told me that he went through
a similar experience. But it would have never been similar. If you know anything about Ron, a Vietnam War Veteran who was
wounded and paralyzed preventing him from ever walking again, you'll know that he went through hell. For him it was like he
lost everything: his legs, the ability to use his sexual organs and have children with a spouse. His loss was deep and devastating.
The catharsis that I went through while writing Tamara's Journey had to do with being able to finally express my feelings
and emotions and getting in touch with my Divine Inner Feminine Side within my fleeting subconscious. I was working out resolving
emotional hurt from when I was a little kid. Ron sacrificed his body and his very soul for his country. There's absolutely
no comparison.
Nevertheless, eventually I got a new computer and then I went through the laborious task of typing all of that scribble on
over 800 pages of looseleaf paper into a Word document and then going through fifteen drafts which is the book that you hold
in your hands now. I didn't hire an editor. No way; this was my book and no one was going to touch this except me. This was
my baby. I envisioned it, created it and willed it into reality with my own hands.
It's not so easy to express what I went through when I wrote this book in this article, but that's kinda why I started this
web site. Gradually you're going to see more and more articles like this one where I tell the story(s) of my experiences that
led up to writing this and during the time it was written. I'm going to lay my soul bare, if you don't mind. It's something
that I have to do, eventually.
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