“Shimmering Images” is a guide on how to write your memoir. Here are 50 things to know about memoir and the book.

1. Memoir is storytelling.
2. Storytelling is art.
3. Memoir is art.
4. There’s a reason memoirs by newsmakers and celebrities top bestseller lists and capture the imagination of the American reading public.
5. This is the Age of Memoir
6. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out: Memoirs were once used mainly by retired political figures to burnish their reputations and relate a few moldy anecdotes of the self-serving “and then I telephoned the White House on the hotline” variety. But the times they are a changin’ and memoir is now the form of the masses.
7. Writing your personal stories can transform the life you are living.
8. Memoir is a story you shape about your life.
9. Memoir is an agent of change.
10. Memoir is a story of some slim segment of your life.
11. “Shimmering Images” are the basis of memoir.
12. “Shimmering Images” are flickering memory pictures—like an image of your mother peeling potatoes at the sink—that you’ve remembered forever and that hang around in your mind waiting to bring meaning in your life.
13. “Shimmering Images” are doorways to your most powerful personal stories.
14. You use your “Shimmering Images” to construct meaning.
15. Writing stories is a way to order chaos.
16. Story heals the soul in an elemental way.
17. Memoir closes a story around life experience and in the process “closes” that experience in the past.
18. You make stories to take yourself and others to a new realm where the spirit can be repaired.
19. People read memoir to learn how to live a better life by witnessing mistakes, victories, wisdom, and humility displayed by fellow human beings.
20. People read memoir to find heroes of everyday life.
21. People want to be shown examples of how to live a better life.
22. Each person has a story he tells about his life. Writing memoir is about transforming that story.
23. Everything is a story.
24. The job of the memoirist is to claim your own truth, accept responsibility for your actions, and make sense of other people’s actions in the context of a story.
25. Every person remembers dozens of “Shimmering Images” every day.
26. Life wouldn’t be recognizable without your “Shimmering Images.”
27. People remember “Shimmering Images” because memories wait for you to pay attention to them and see the wisdom they have to share.
28. Writing a personal story helps you make sense of the chaos of life events and attach meaning to them.
29. People use words to make meaning in their lives.
30. If you do not write your hardest stories they remain confused inside of you and you never get on to other things in your life.
31. Writing life stories borders on they mystical because you become the master of your own reality.
32. Writing a personal story is a kind of art that soothes the soul.
33. When you write down your “Shimmering Images” and find the wisdom that’s inside them, you change.
34. When you use the wisdom of your “Shimmering Images” to make a truth about the past, a new future dawns.
35. Writing “Shimmering Images” gives people the opportunity to break free of old storylines and move on to bigger, more compassionate selves.
36. “Shimmering Images” are key to understanding your life.
37. If you write with balance, honesty, and compassion you don’t hurt people with your memoir.
38. You must voice your stories to get beyond them.
39. Being honest in memoir has to do with compassion for self and others.
40. You can’t be truly honest if you aren’t being compassionate.
41. Getting honest in memoir means learning compassion for the people in your life you would rather demonize.
42. Getting honest in memoir means coming to terms with shared humanness, seeing all the players with empathy, including yourself.
43. You have the right to speak.
44. You have the right to tell your stories.
45. You have the right to be heard.
46. The book, “Shimmering Images,” helps you believe the stories you tell are important.
47. The book, “Shimmering Images,” refuses to let naysayers silence the storyteller in each person.
48. The book, “Shimmering Images,” helps you rip away the illusion of what you’ve always told yourself—the negative storylines—and construct a new, more positive way of seeing life experience.
49. Narrative heals.
50. The book “Shimmering Images,” gives writers a way to use wisdom to touch hearts and changes lives.

My head is swimming with houses. I’ve looked at so many potential homes in and around Santa Fe, I can hardly think. Ever had real estate overload?

When I get back to the ranch where I am staying, I have friends to greet me. Here are some photos of my buddies.

Just couldn’t get the pooches to cooperate for a perfect pose. But they’ve been such good companions these past weeks I wanted you all to meet them. That’s Garbo in the back with the curly tail, and Newman in the front with his nose to the ground.

Schwaebisch Hall—November 11, 2010

It’s the end of my first week of an Intensive German Language course at the Goethe Institute in Schwaebisch Hall, Germany. Those years of college language courses creep back into consciousness. Grammar flows onto the page, but still I stand in the vegetable section of the local Kaufland grocery store buying pistachios and apples and go blank when a colleague greets me with “Wie gehts!”

All my travels in Europe earlier this year made me crave a closeness with the German culture that I hadn’t felt since my humanities and music study in college. What all this will mean for the story I am writing I can not say right now, but I trust that it will be revealed when I need to know.