A Bunch of Nonfiction

I'm editing for a website, working on a past-life memoir, and nearly finished with the spiritual nonfiction project I've mentioned before. I've also been reading a lot of nonfiction, from books on how to write nonfiction proposals to books on how memory works and why we forget the things we forget. It all adds up to a lot of nonfiction.

I have to admit, there was a time when I thought I'd never write nonfiction. At that point, it held no interest for me. I fell into the first project gradually, one journal entry at a time, and before I knew it I found that I had amassed a lot of information on a subject that people might care about. It was one of those synergistic things where I wrote all the information regardless and didn't realize it could be a book until later.

The past-life memoir is different. I started out intending it to be read, so it reads a lot like a novel and not a dry recitation of history. Being an extremely ancient past life, it cannot be proven or disproven by me or anyone else, but despite my inability to prove it's true, I can't call it fiction. I've read one or two past-life memoirs written by other people, and they also read like fiction, especially the ones in which the person claims they used to be a person whom many people think didn't exist. I speak here of the book "Guenevere" by Laurel Phelan. Fascinating book, and a window into Guenevere's life that most people won't have ever considered. I'm also aware that there are biographies out there for lives lived so long ago that there is no way we can be sure the biographer got all the details right, as they had to reconstruct the story from history and archeology. But they all make fascinating reads, in any case.