Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Medical Extremes And Looking For A Literary Agent

Dear Lit Loves,
Greetings Book Lovies!  No, I'm not reviewing a memoir manuscript for today's post.  Actually, I'm not really thrilled with any of the memoirs being released as of late.  I think there are entirely too many memoirs on the market dealing with war, being in the military, getting kicked out of a religious community,  going from being a city mouse to a country mouse, and celebrity memoir.  I yearn to see more memoirs dealing with the nitty gritty in life.  I've been dealing with a great deal of medical extremes my entire life so naturally I enjoy when people write about navigating the crazy world of medicine, specialists, hospitals, and oftentimes strange and unusual ailments.  Speaking of strange and unusual ailments, that's the core of my latest manuscript.  Lord knows I've dealt with my fair share of medical abnormalities:  Meniere's disease, Uveitis, Uveitic Glaucoma, and Cogan's syndrome.  Sometimes it's not what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life, but the unplanned and downright confounding that define you as a person and what you make of your life. So we'll see if there is a literary agent that can handle this most captivating manuscript.  The querying process isn't easy.  Actually, in my opinion, querying is the difficult part of the publishing process. It's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you'll get. 

The crazy and insane happen each day.  Most recently I've lost a woman who was like a great aunt to me when she was admitted to the hospital for blood pressure that was too low.  The hospital stabilized her and then her blood pressure started falling again while she was being released.  She never left the hospital.  She wound up in the ICU and her organs began to fail.  Six hours later she was gone.  I was shell-shocked.  Still am.  And I also have a former colleague and friend battling a rare and aggressive cancer.  I actually wrote a contemporary women's fiction manuscript and dedicated it to her.  She's one tough cookie.  To see her ravaged by cancer is just mind-boggling.  I keep thinking why her?  why now?  Sometimes we don't get to pick and choose our battles; some battles arrive knocking at our front door unexpected and unannounced.  Yeah, you could not answer the door and hope the little bugger goes away, but I've always found that it's better just to look crisis in the eye, open the door, let it make itself comfortable and then get up close and personal with it just to see what you learn from it. 

Till my next post,
Grace

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