A Beginning
So, um... Hi.
My name is Nathan Herman, and I'm a writer. No, wait – let me try that again.
My name is Nathan Herman, and I loved a woman named Ali.
Nearly 6 years ago that girl – my best friend, my wife, my everything – died unexpectedly. This blog/website/whatever is an attempt to chronicle my quest to immortalize and bring the essence of this person that I knew and loved to the world at large. Somehow I hope to finish writing and publishing a book about our lives together, both before and after our timelines converged and then once more separated. I suppose I should say a little bit about myself to give some context.
I was born with a genetic disorder known as Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II. There are three types, and I have the second most severe one… Lucky me. If you didn't click the link, the Cliff's Notes version is that I've never been able to walk, and over the course of my life I will lose all gross motor function. Yeah, that includes the ability to breathe on my own. As it stands now at the age of 32, I can move my right thumb some as well as control my facial features, breathe, and swallow (kind of). That's about it.
In 2004 I met a girl named Ali online on a punk message board. We fell in love, she flew across the country to move in with me, we flew back across the country to get married, and remained so until she died nearly 5 years later. She was my life, and I was hers. I'm not going to go on too much about our relationship, as that will likely be getting covered six ways until Sunday in later posts. After she passed, I decided to do what she had always urged me to do: write a book about my life. Well… Mostly. I decided instead to write a book about OUR lives. I started that project in early 2011, and now I'm getting to the point where I can begin to think about publishing it.
Which is what this is. I plan to chronicle my successes and failures in the process of publishing… A subject I know next to nothing about, since I had never seriously written anything before this book. I'm still trying to plug giant holes in the book's narrative along with editing chapters to get them into a somewhat readable state, so updates to this site will be vying against my inherently lazy nature and content creation for the book. I'm also going to post random samples of my writing to try and drum up some publicity. I assume that's what you're supposed to do this kind of thing, I really have no idea.
So join me, won't you? We can stumble down this dark and unpaved path together and see what we find along the way. The site will likely be under construction for quite a while as I figure out what I'm doing on that front, too.
Stay tuned, kids.