| A.E. Albert: A Writer's Blog

Love Target by Heidi Loeb Hegerich

Teenager Ingrid Liebschreiber is devastated when her parents move the family from their native Munich to Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Homesick, she accepts a neighbor's offer to get her a job as a showgirl in Las Vegas.

Intent on earning enough money to return to Germany, she must grow up quickly in the neon jungle — where she is pursued by high rollers and headliners, including a vacationing Elvis.

Life's twists and turns land Ingrid in New York in the Swinging 1960s - where she is romanced by Armand: a strong, quiet, handsome businessman in "construction." Most girls dream of Mr. Right, and Ingrid's hard-won independence is challenged when she falls in love.

Will she find true romance — a man who can love her as much as she loves him? Or is "happily ever after" just a crazy fairytale?

Everyone knows that writing is hard work. Unless you write regularly, your mental muscles can get a tiring workout even trying to compose a simple handwritten thank-you note to a friend for a wonderful evening.

Are your words striking the right tone? Are you being witty or just silly? Maybe you should just send a short email or text — standard these days. Punctuate it with emoticons and text symbols!

I didn’t have the luxury of falling back on messaging technology when I finally succumbed to the urging of friends, family — and even strangers I’d struck up conversations with over the years — to write my life story. A story of a girl who runs away from home as a 16-year-old and becomes an underage showgirl in Las Vegas — and that’s just the start of her wild adventures through the swinging 1960s and into the ’70s. But my first attempt ended up in 60 dull, disjointed pages of typing that I burned in disgust in my kitchen sink. Then I gave up. The task seemed impossible!

But friends and family persisted with their broken-record question: “When are you going to write your book?” Finally, I found an editor to guide me through the process — and keep me from giving up, sort of the way a personal trainer keeps you working hard at the gym. Was this cheating? I don’t believe so. I was still driving the bus. I had the story in my head. I just needed to get it out onto typewritten pages, in a cohesive manner. And so my editor and I sat down and developed an outline of the book’s story — chapter by chapter, point by point. In this way, the major and minor characters sprung out of my memory banks, along with events and places I needed to conjure up from 40, 50, even 60 years earlier. They were all up there in my brain, memories waiting to be unlocked. I inserted them into my storyline in a semi-orderly fashion.

Then I had a revelation. I wanted my book to be a novel, not an autobiography. I wanted to protect certain people by fictionalizing them, and I wanted the freedom to condense my story and make it a readable narrative by inventing what needed to be invented and omitting what needed to be omitted to make my book a good, fun read. My editor agreed. And so, together, we set about composing my memoir novel.

While it was torture for me writing each chapter, and I was mentally drained after each session lasting from an hour to five hours, I began to develop my writing and editing muscles as surely as daily workouts at the gym strengthen your physique. I increased my stamina, and my confidence. As one chapter after another came to life, I saw progress. I was getting somewhere! The pages I was composing didn’t seem destined for the kitchen sink.

My editor stepped in to remind me that these chapters were only early drafts. The key to a readable manuscript was in the rewrite, he told me. After about eight months I had my first draft. But as he and I reviewed it — and enlisted the aid of two professional readers — we decided what we had, in fact, was two books: the first novel and its sequel. So we essentially chopped out the last half of the manuscript, saving it for down the road, and focused on the first half.

Then the rewriting began. Together, my editor and I read out loud each chapter, pens in hand, scratching out words or sentences or paragraphs or whole pages, scribbling new words or sentences or paragraphs or pages, fixing details, dialogue, dramatic rises and falls. We marked spots where we needed to fact check the dates of historic events, the physical features of a specific restaurant or nightclub or street, the proper jargon used by certain ethnic groups in a certain period, the style of clothes worn in a certain year. We finished out a second draft. Then we rewrote it for a third draft. We chopped out five or six chapters (movie mogul Robert Evans would probably be grateful for that, as would the late dictator’s son Ramfis Trujillo, were he still alive), and added two or three new ones.

We had the professional readers review the latest draft. Using their feedback, we chopped out a few more chapters — they didn’t carry the story forward, and they portrayed the characters acting in inconsistent ways — and we added a new final chapter to bring the story to its proper conclusion.

My editor and I read through the new draft out loud all over again — from the dramatic dialogue of the opening sentence to the closing, melodic words of the last paragraph. And the pages we ended up with were heavily marked up in pen, as with previous drafts.

Two years had passed since I’d begun the first draft!

I measured progress in the fact that my story now sounded very good to my ears when read out loud. (I learned this secret: If it sounds good when read out loud, it reads well on the page.) And the few trusted people I passed the manuscript around to said the same thing. They were, in fact, amazed I had produced this 128,000-word manuscript.

And so I finally had to make a very tough decision. I had to declare that the manuscript was finished. All it needed now was proofreading — and being sent off to the printer. (I was self-publishing.)

When “Love Target” came out in May 2014, I felt like a proud mommy. My labor had been 27 months — three times longer than a pregnancy. But my child was the best I could have produced. I was tired, I was drained, but the fatigue from all the ultra-marathon hours of mental labor no longer mattered. I’d gotten my book published. And all the people who’d nagged me over the years to write it could be told that it was done — and they were welcome to buy it!

Of course, I craved a bigger audience than the people in my immediate circle. I wanted my book out on the market for all readers to consider buying. And henceforth came a new revelation.

They say that writing is hard work? It’s like a vacation compared to marketing!

I suppose this is a whole other essay, isn’t it?

Title: Love Target
Genre: Romance/Chick lit/Historical romance

Heidi Loeb Hegerich has lived in places as varied as Munich, Las Vegas, Miami Beach, New York, Los Angeles, Squaw Valley and Reno. She has worked variously as a showgirl, business executive, entrepreneur, interior designer and real estate developer. She has traveled to six of the seven continents, and vacationed in spots as different as the French Riviera, the Andes and Afghanistan. She counts among her hobbies weight training, shooting assault rifles, and racing sand rails; she found skydiving entertaining but not as much of a rush as other pursuits.

A philanthropist for the arts, among other causes, Hegerich is now embarking on her own artistic quest as an author. The novel Love Target is her first book.

Buy links:

www.lovetarget.com

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Target-Heidi-Loeb-Hegerich-ebook/dp/B00KCS0OCY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424291237&sr=1-1&keywords=love+target

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