Jon Magee shares the personal side of researching your memoires in his AuthorHouse Author’s Digest series. He reflects on how people from your past react to a visit from their memories and the importance of continuing to remember those who will never be a part of your life again.
Jon Magee is the AuthorHouse author of From Barren Rocks . . . To Living Stones and Paradise Island, Heavenly Journey. He imparts his story throughout this week about how he came to share his fascinating life through his writing.
Bringing the Open Life to the World … Research that Leads to Marketing
By Jon Magee
Allow me to reflect a little as we think through the marketing possibilities.
It was Autumn 2008.
Sat at the front I looked around at the folks surrounding me. There were some that I recognized as having played a vital part in my life. The past year had developed in ways that I had never anticipated back in the beginning of 2007 when I began the writing experiences that I referred to previously.
Then there is the research I have already referred to. Memory is not enough to rely on after a forty year gap. As one might expect when dealing with nomadic lives, some areas were to prove more difficult than others. Tracing through some of the areas covered by the fourteen schools I studied in were to prove to be an eye opener.
Reactions to the Past
For every one, in the passage of forty years we all develop and mature differently, and to some degree we may be shaped in accordance with the environment and circumstances in which we have lived. I recall the nervousness looking back at the past, how would people react?
Some would naturally find it difficult to know how to appropriately respond to a visit from the past, some may feel that there are experiences of those teenage years that will cause too much pain to be remembered, and that likewise is something that needs to be respected and understood, knowing that the development on the journey of life has taken teenage friends on different routes and into environments that have shaped and matured us in different ways.
Appreciating the People in Our Lives
Part of the appreciation of past friendships is to understand that there are some experiences of the past that are easier dealt with when they are locked away in some form of imaginary compartment that is marked “the past”. The friendship and the help that was there in days gone by is best appreciated when the understanding of the current needs are taken into consideration, no matter how difficult that may be.
That may even be heartbreaking in some respects!
There were, however, some who were to prove that the passage of time does not need to be a hindrance to reactivating and developing the friendship that once was known. They had matured in differing environments, the experiences of life had brought them through different kinds of tragedies upon the way, yet still there was a possibility to discover there were still things they had in common from a matured life style.
There were also many people, who could not be traced, and sadly, there were to be a number who had already died at a young age, and it was now too late to complete any unfinished business. Perhaps that is the tragedy of hind sight that it can sometimes be too late that we realize how important it is to show our appreciation of the people who have featured in our lives. For such reasons as that, I wish I had made my attempts at an earlier age.
Jon’s remaining AuthorHouse Author’s Digest articles will talk about the marketing strategies he employs to share his life through his books.
Jon Magee’s AuthorHouse Bibliography
• From Barren Rocks . . . To Living Stones
• Paradise Island, Heavenly Journey
