Keeping the Tryst: Evolution of a book

Earlier tonight I was checking some things on Facebook and there was a memory that popped up, from a year ago.  Usually I don't look at those, there have been just so many things I've shared over the years.  But for whatever reason I went down the rabbit hole and took a gander.

Here is what it pulled out from this day in 2025.  A few things: this references the time I spent at the nearby Whataburger (the first location in the state of South Carolina).  I was there for awhile, earning some supplemental income to the artificial intelligence training I've been doing a few years now.

And at this point Keeping the Tryst had pretty much gone through editing and revision.  This was heading toward the final stages in getting it published.  This was also the time when I had started designing the cover.

I went further.  It turns out that a LOT has happened on July 26-es.

From ten years ago, when Tammy and I were in Oklahoma City.  Pokemon Go had been out for a few weeks and I was having fun going to gyms and taking on whoever was in control.  On July 26, 2016 I was on fire!  And I was having lots of giggles installing Pokemon with some funny names...

A few more clicks and I came to this post, from 2015.  Again, about the book.  At this point it had been in the works for about nine months.  I started working on it roughly two months before Dad died.  He was the one who most encouraged me to write it (a lot of other people had been telling me that I should write a book too).

As you can see the book (which was far from having a title) was in much different condition from what it would eventually transmogrify into.  It was going to originally be more in-depth about my life with bipolar disorder.  And this was also more than ten years before the book was finally published (say, what is keeping George R.R. Martin from finishing The Winds of Winter anyway?).  A lot happened in my life during the intervening decade.  Good, bad, wacky, tragic, horrific, hilarious.  And during that time more people said that they wanted to read my entire life story.  So that's what it became.

At the time Chapter 2 did cover the first twenty-five years of my life.  In its radically changed final form the second chapter of Keeping the Tryst spans up to the time I'm in second grade.  Blame my incredibly precise memory: I came to realize that there was much in my childhood that resonated across the next several decades.  Like how Chapter 2 now starts, with my first brush with insanity at the age of six.

It's really quite something, as the author of the book, to look back upon its evolution.  It's kind of a chronicle of how I was also evolving as a person.

Maybe someday I'll get to do it again.  I like to think that as far as I've come as a human being, there is still quite a bit of developing left.  Perhaps there will be enough material for a sequel.

Categories: book, keeping the tryst, pokemon, video games, writing