Day after Day

This is the first book I have had printed in 2007 through a private agency - can't even remember the name of it now - and I sent the 40 copies which cost about £200  to various relatives, and then I properly proofread the book myself - and was aghast. Even the spelling on the edge of the book was incorrect.  It was absolutely chock a block with mistakes - thousands of them. I had to send a list of corrections to all the relatives I sent it to. And I was so embarrassed at having promoted my writing ability - so badly.

I got a lot of feed back, and most of it was negative and it almost put me off writing completely. My brother-in-law, who actually knew Muriel and some of the other mentioned in the story, said that I, who had never met them, hadn't captured anything like their true personalities. He felt that if I didn't write pure non-fiction  based entirely on personal knowledge, then it wasn't true family history and therefore not only deception but totally unfair .  He felt that if I wrote this sort of story, I should have changed all the names, and made it completely a work of fiction.

Another realive of Philip's - who himself is a prolific writer, took the book and proofread it, adding his comments in the margins. There were more comments than there were words in the book. I felt so bad when I got it, but Philip took his book of corrections and hid it - and I didn't find it again until after Philip died and I was moving house.

But even though I probably got the personalities of all these people wrong, I still enjoyed writing it and since I will never know the real people who are long dead when I look at their bits and pieces that I have  inherited, I think of them as my characters, and like them.