Time spent reminiscing seems to be proportional to age. As the years add up, I find myself reminiscing about my childhood days in Eldorado Springs, a small Mom and Pop resort nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. My grandparents owned and operated the resort, and my great-grandfather, Frank Fowler, started it up in the early 1900s. My parents had gotten divorced and Mom moved us back in with hers. My brothers and I were treated to something otherwise unavailable to us. Our grandparents, Jack and Mabel Fowler, were truly exceptional people and we got a front row seat to the end of their lives.
And what lives they had, starting in the 1890s and ending in the 1990s. Imagine the changes they saw…from President McKinley to President George H.W. Bush, horse power to rocket power, candle light to neon lights, moonlit strolls to lunar landings.
After we moved to Eldorado, I recalled learning how to navigate using South Boulder Creek, jumping rock to rock across the creek, learning to visualize each next hop, I began to wonder if young Jack did the same thing as a kid. His dad, Frank, was building Eldorado when he was a young boy, and I began to imagine what life was like for him in those early days.
My mom lives in Arvada, Colorado, not too far away from Eldorado Springs, and not too far away from my current home in Parker, Colorado. She still had a lot of the old photos and historical information about Jack and Mabel. She let me look at their letters, a whole series of love letters from Jack, starting when he went to the army in 1918 until just about the time they got married in 1923. There weren’t any letters from Mabel, Jack had to burn them while in the army as he had no place to keep them. Later, Jack moved to Los Angeles and he continued writing Mabel until he convinced her to come out west.
This seemed like a great story to me, a love story of a couple young kids in the early 20th century, facing war and separation, then living apart for a time, finally becoming a family. I decided to write the story from the perspective of the letters, actually using the letters as the story.
The first problem was coming up with Mabel’s half of the letters. I looked through Jack’s letters and noted some areas where he had responded to direct questions within Mabel’s letters. This allowed me to surmise what she had written and I began writing some letters from Mabel. I asked my mom what she thought Mabel would have written, and she said, “Oh, probably a lot of news about what was going on in Denver at the time.” I also read through Jack’s letters and began typing up revised versions, editing them for grammar and content to provide a clearer story.
My partner, Tolli Grisham, and I decided we wanted to get some marketing advice, so we reached out to several people in that line of work and ended up talking with Lori Dubois, who asked if I was going to use a book coach. She had another client who had, and thought she benefitted from it. I started looking for a book coach and talked with several. I was conflicted as to whether I needed one and if so, who?
My background, and Tolli’s, is in engineering and project management, and in discussing the project with some book coaches it became clear that one of the main benefits of using them is the project management and discipline they bring to the effort. I also spoke with a professional editing service found on the Internet, and they offered to help me solely in the editing. We decided on using the editing services only; between me and Tolli, we had the project management covered.
The editor provides a number of hours discussion on the project as part of their services, and we began by discussing the letters. The editor brought up the limitations of such a project:
We need to limit the story to occur within the timeframe of the letters
It is difficult to create an interesting story using letters
it will be important to develop Mabel’s voice as unique to Jack’s
Tolli and I were on the front porch one afternoon discussing the project and she suggested the story is not just Jack and Mabel’s story, it’s my story too. They had such an impact on me growing up, especially my grandpa, that it would be great to include in the project. Also, Jack was a Civil Air Patrol pilot during WWII and did so many other interesting things, it would be a shame to limit the project to only a few years of his life. So we decided upon the revised project: dual memoirs, Jack’s and mine, and how they interplayed over time and space. I discussed the idea with the editor, who thought it was good, and began writing. Upon review of the initial draft of the first chapter, the editor suggested a working title: A Generation Apart.