Reading my own books is utterly bizarre. I’ll be going along, involved in the story, loving what I’m reading, wondering what’s coming next. Whenever I’d stop to take a breath, it would stun me to realize I wrote the book. How is that even possible? Not the writing — I remember writing and rewriting and re-rewriting More Deaths Than One, for example, but except for a brief synopsis, the same one on the cover — “What if you returned home after years away and found someone with your face living your life . . .” — the story was completely new to me.
I do remember wondering if More Deaths Than One might be a tad amateurish, but I’m not finding that at all. Well, there is the girl with the eyes that sparkle perhaps too often, but even today, I wouldn’t know a different way of showing, from the hero’s point of view, how much he lit up her life. And there is . . . hmm, I don’t know . . . maybe a bit of passive storytelling, but I remember thinking that I wanted the relationship between the boy and girl to be of paramount importance as they discover the truth rather than a thriller-like chase. Whatever the case, I can no longer judge the merits of my books except for the very personal one of getting to read — and enjoy — these books as if for the first time.
I mentioned before that the “Pat Bertram” books were written by someone else, someone I’d been years before. In the case of More Deaths Than One, that someone is the person I was twenty-years ago, before Jeff died, before I went to California to take care of my father, before dance classes, before buying a house, before gardening. There’s been a lot of living in the past twenty years! No wonder there’s such a huge disconnect between the author I was and the reader I am.
Although the books were written in part for a future me, since back then (and still today) I have a hard time finding books that speak to me, I feared reading them again. What if I hated them? What if they struck me as abysmal as most books do nowadays? What if I were embarrassed by non-existent storytelling abilities? But whew! That’s not been an issue. (Well, I am a bit embarrassed by the sex scenes in More Deaths Than One. This is the only Pat Bertram book that has any, and as I’m beginning to see, they are an integral part of the character, but still . . .)
I have found a few changes to my submitted manuscripts (like the ones in Bob: The Right Hand of God that make me look as if I don’t know what I’m doing when in fact it was an editor who made the changes), a few words in both A Spark of Heavenly Fire and More Deaths Than One that mysteriously became hyphenated (more editor’s work, I suppose), and a stray typo or two. Despite those minor imperfections, the books all seem professional to me.
But yes, it’s utterly bizarre to be reading a book I wrote, breathlessly waiting to see what happens next. And it’s even more bizarre to be blown away by the ending. Whooo.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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