I think many of you know I had put off writing Mari’s book for a little while but I may not have gone into why I did so.

Through different writing forums I became apart of I found out the book I had completed would be a great one for family and friends as long as that is where it ended. But if I wanted it to be read by more than just people I knew then it needed to be done in a completely different way. One thing I kept being told is I needed to add fiction elements to her book.

At first this was completely foreign to me. I am writing, after all, nonfiction right. Shouldn’t I be writing a biography/part autobiography of what needs to be said. The sad truth for me is I was completely wrong. Here is a quote from the book Writing & Selling Your Memoir. “Unless you are Bill Clinton or Eleanor Roosevelt (in which case you have resurrected yourself from the dead, which in itself would make for a fascinating memoir) or some other equally important person of significant historical stature, you are not writing an autobiography… If I were to write an autobiography, I assure you that no one could possibly care less as to whether or not it was snowing on the day I was born. As for Princess Di, surely there are chat groups devoted to that very topic.” This basically told me that I was way off kilter.

Over the last year I started to think about how I could better her story and I kept coming back to her hospital story. I have received more comments on this site to her story than any other posting. The most recent one (on July 1, 2012) really showed me how impactful the story is.

I’ve decided to take her hospital story and turn it into a full length book. It will have a lot of fiction writing elements in it (like dialogue, keeping the point of view correct, making sure my tenses stay in the right form, and so on) to make it jump off the page with way more gusto than it does now.

I know her story has already touched so many people’s lives just the way it is now. I can only imagine taking her story and expanding upon what it will do. Mari had a way of touching people’s lives like I had never seen a person who never knew she was doing it. Even in death, she is still able to do this. Mari has permanently left a mark on so many people lives. I feel blessed to have been her mom.

Now as I write out her hospital story, I know it will not be easy but the end result will be worth it’s weight in gold (as they say).