research – Norma J. Hill

I started this “Summerland Stories” project 16 days ago. Well, actually I started recording my Summerland memories back in 2010, and have been working on them–sporadically, I’ll admit–ever since. Some of them have been published as articles in the Southern Exposure newspaper and in the Archivos Journal of the Okanagan Archive Trust Society. Others I have posted on one of my websites. And others are scribblings in my journals and on old laptops and elsewhere.

A “Summerland Story” published in Archivos Magazine

Anyway, I thought it would be easy to simply collate them and publish them. Maybe not so much. To start with, I had to dig around in my bookshelves to find original copies of the published articles. Then I discovered that there were multiple drafts, with lots of changes, of some of the stories. For ones on old laptops and saved on CDs, I had to do a lot of digging indeed. Luckily, I had previously typed up information from the packages of old letters and old autograph books, or I would have had to dig those out of stashed-away boxes. And then there are the photos–so many photos. I have scanned many of them in the past, but discovered that they are scattered here and there on my present laptop and old laptop and more CDs. And there are more in old albums that haven’t been scanned. Oh my!

I dragged together as many of the old articles and jottings as I could, and started to put them together. But it wasn’t easy. How should I organize them? By date? By sources? By themes? By topics? After sitting down and organizing and reorganizing, I came up with a possible outline and put the stories I’d gathered in potential order–which I’m realizing more and more will need more re-organizing. I didn’t worry too much about grammar and such in that first draft. It only took me 8 days and 30 hours to finish that very rough draft. But don’t forget that most of the material had already been written, and sometimes rewritten over and over, long ago. Yikes! Lots of the editing jobs I do for other people don’t take that long!

Today, after another 6 days (and a few days of “breaks”) I finished the second draft. This time around, I focused on doing some reorganizing, and adding a bit of extra material. I also realized that because I had written the stories at different times, there was in some cases quite a lot of overlap. So I had to decide in which stories particular details were most important, and remove them from other stories. I also carefully checked grammar, punctuation, and other nit-picking details like spelling changes over time. After all, I’m an editor, and I would be terribly embarrassed to send out the manuscript to beta-readers, an editor, and designer, only to discover that I’d made an awful lot of errors. Not to mention that I discovered a lot of filler words that I repeat far too often, among them words like “very” and “also” and “always” and so on. (Yes, and “so on”!). Delete, delete, delete. This second draft has taken me another 20+ hours, and I am even less comfortable with the organization. And I find myself worrying that some folks mentioned in the stories might be offended and others not mentioned might feel left out. And then there’s been a growing realization about how much my early childhood has affected the way I think and perceive and behave (I’ve actually been dreaming about this). I still haven’t sorted out those photos (how many should I even include?), and now I am wondering if I need to include a foreword or introduction or prologue or whatever. Oh my goodness!

The bright side of all this is the many people who are encouraging me and looking forward to buying a copy of the book when it finally comes out. Finally? How long is this going to take anyway? Egad!

Onward! (And thanks for following this crazy journey!)

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Norma J. Hill

a pen and paper mama site

Category: research

Surprise! Self-editing is Harder than Editing for Others

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