Bee Bloeser discussed her inspiration for Vaccines and Bayonets and her unique method of organizing the storyline. She emphasized the importance of beta readers and editors in the writing process and highlighted the research process for her book. Additionally, she offered advice for individuals looking to write about their past experiences and discussed the process of hybrid publishing.

Key Points

• Bee explains the inspiration behind her book Vaccines and Bayonets and how she felt compelled to write it after going through documents from her time in West Africa.
• Bee describes her unique method of organizing the storyline by creating a timeline with flags, moving cards around on her living room floor, and later on a closet door to structure the chapters and ensure a good story arc.
• Lisa and Bee discuss the importance of beta readers and editors in the writing process, emphasizing the value of constructive criticism and the impact it makes on the final product.
• Bee elaborates on the research process for her book, highlighting the need for historical context, utilizing resources like State Department recordings and memoirs, and even finding visual aids on platforms like YouTube to enhance her storytelling.
• Bee offers advice to individuals looking to write about their past experiences or turn documents into a story, emphasizing the importance of starting to write, preserving documents, identifying a central theme, and considering the audience for whom the story is intended.
• Bee explains the process of hybrid publishing and why she chose Wheatmark Publishing in Tucson, Arizona.
• Bee discusses how her book’s purpose evolved from telling stories to inspiring readers, leading to the upcoming release of an audiobook version of Vaccines and Bayonets.

I’m here today with author and speaker and memoirist Bee Bloeser. Welcome, Bee.

Bee: Thanks, Lisa. It’s great to have going to be on your show.

Lisa: Bee and I first met when we both released books in the spring of 2021. Mine was a novel and hers a memoir. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your book and your journey to publication?

Bee: Sure. The title of the book is Vaccines and Bayonets: Fighting Smallpox in Africa Amid Tribalism, Terror and the Cold War. It’s a historical memoir of our time in West Africa. When my husband was helping to wipe smallpox off the face of the earth. It began as a public health journey and became a geopolitical one with somewhat of a political thriller aspect to it.

When we were transferred to a country that was in the grip of a vicious dictator who had won the first presidential election, the book was I didn’t start out to write a book. It’s just that I had all these documents. My husband had passed away. This is like 12 years ago. He was a paperholic and I was reading through this entire file drawer of documents from our time in West Africa.

And they just screamed at me, You have to write this book. You have to write this book. I had no choice. So that’s how I started documenting a really important story.

Lisa: So you had all these documents and you had a story that you knew was in there that you knew you had to tell. So how did you find the story among these documents? You said he was a paperaholic, so there must have been a lot of documents, a lot of duplicates, a lot of stuff that didn’t really add to the story. How did you go through all that and find the story?

Bee: Well, it was a daunting task. When I had these documents spread out on the on my bed and on my table, and I tried to figure out how to make sense of the storyline because there were one of the problems was that there were multiple documents talking about the same thing.

There were Karl’s official reports to CDC. There were official government documents, embassy documents, all unclassified. You understand? I have no classified documents in my possession, but many of these talked about some of the same things.

So actually, I finally put a painter’s tape the entire length of the hallway in my apartment and started putting little flags of the events and so on.

And actually, Lisa, I kept it when I moved out of that apartment, had a ceremony with champagne and cheese and took it down and saved it. I know that people who are just on and people on audio cannot see this. And I don’t know if it shows up at all.

Lisa: Yeah. Because we are just a podcast, but maybe I can post a short clip of this video on YouTube so you can see that. Yeah. So you did a timeline. You’ve got the timeline of events, but then, you know, stories aren’t necessary linear. So how did you go from that then to going to organizing it into a story?

Bee: I worked from my memories, then plugged these events into memories of things that were just emblazoned in my memory from time there. I did not write the book chronologically, even though it does happen and the story is in a chronological order for the most part. But I first wrote the events, then the stories.

Like each chapter is a story within the story and of the events that were the most burned into my memory because of the traumatic nature of them. Those were the things I wrote first, and I wound up then later organizing. I put the different stories or chapter tentative titles or keywords on the backs of old business cards.

And I first spread them all over my living room floor and then thought, okay, well, this should come first or this story is getting a little too tense here. I need to give the reader a break with something light. And so would plug in to that spot and remove the cards around and think, okay, this slightly humorous story or lighthearted, this lighthearted incident would give the reader a break from the tension and curious on to the next part of both of my memories and about my story.

Lisa: And you did that on your living room floor?

Bee: It started on my living room floor. And then one evening I was having some people over. And so obviously it had to go and I had moved them to a table. They wound up eventually on the back of the hall closet door with Scotch tape. And many, many, many times over the months, I would move those things around.

And no, no, this really needs to be here so that we had a good story arc and also the conflict and so on, building toward the conflict situations and then the relief from that and then building some more building hire for the next episode, next thing, the next bit of conflict.

Lisa: So did you have some people helping you with this? I mean, did you invite them to come into your closet or.

Bee: No, I didn’t. I showed it to a number of my fellow writers as we went along. And in fact, I mentioned taking down the timeline when I was ready to move, the apartment was totally empty. The furniture, everything, all the boxes, they were gone. The only thing left in the apartment was the timeline, and I had that there for five years at that point.

So my fellow memoirists, the Memoir Mavens came over to this empty apartment, brought champagne and cheese, and we had this little ceremony, and I took the timeline down off the wall. So no one helped me with changing the order of chapters. But they enjoyed. And a number of them said this is really helpful to them.

And some of them began to use the same system I did. Some people use it entirely digital system. But for me it has to be something organic, something I can touch and physically move around.

Lisa: So you suggest that the method of using cards and taping them to a door?

Bee: Yes. For some people I think that at least a number of people told me it was helpful and somebody even asked my permission to write an article about the way I did it. So I assume some of your listeners could find it helpful to them as well.

Lisa: So when you went in, you were looking at these cards. You asked yourself, did you have like a checklist of things that you would ask yourself when you were looking at these?

Bee: I suppose there was a mental checklist. I didn’t think of it in those terms. It was just more my feeling about it. My feeling about each chapter. Some of them, you know, I felt the tension myself when I really thought about that chapter when I was working on that chapter. Sometimes I was as I was writing and rewriting and rewriting, I would go and think, okay, this is having this on this part of an arc.

I need to go in and switch this card with this one. And so it just kept evolving as I went along. And then, of course, you know, I think writers should always be in a good critique group and I had a great critique group. And of course, most of those people were only seeing one chapter at a time.

But then when I put the manuscript out to beta readers, that led to two or three other rearranging of chapters.

Lisa: Yeah, beta readers are very important as well as editors, because a lot of people may be in critique groups, but those critique, those people who are in your critique group, they are not necessarily editors, they’re not necessarily people who have even written the whole book themselves. But so beta readers can be very important.

Bee: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I happen to be fortunate enough to have a fantastic critique group. There were three people in the group who were retired college professors of creative writing and two people who had careers as editors, but their editing background was not in the creative writing, it was in technical writing. So, you know, they had to learn creative writing themselves as they were bringing their own work.

But there was a really high quality critique group. So I’m glad you pointed that out, Lisa, because you can just be in a group with other people who are learning just as you are.

Lisa: So you got the timeline down and the structure that you wanted down. So what other things did you do to research. There were some dates. Were there dates or facts or things that just were not hazy, that you knew you need to look into more exact?

Bee: When I first started working on this book, I thought, Oh, this is, you know, I’m not going to need to have a bibliography even because this book is going to be entirely from my own documents and my own memories. Well, as I went along, it was obvious that, oh, well, I’m talking about this, but the reader needs some context.

They need the historical context of what was going on at that time. They need this. How did this early post-colonial period work? You know, a lot of different things that I realized had to be researched. Of course, I researched from other books of other historians and so on. But also the State Department has a what do they call it, A and acidity, American State Department.

Anyway, it’s a voice recording of interviews with every ambassador. When they retire, they do a recording about their career. And there were also recordings with CDC at the 30th anniversary of the Eradication of Smallpox, which is a really historic event. There is no other disease, human disease, has ever been eradicated to this point. So at the 30th anniversary, they did a lot of interviews and interviewed a number of our colleagues and so listening to those fleshed out a lot of my memories of the State Department recordings, absolutely went to YouTube and found a let’s see, it was a 60 minute recording that had been done at the time we were in.

We were first in northern Nigeria and that was during the Nigeria Biafra war. And there was a 60 minute show that had been done about that conflict. There were so, so many options out there or finding elements that fit into my story. I also read other memoirs of people writing about their time in Africa, and they would mention some a smell or something like that.

I think, Oh yeah, I remember that. And it would jog my memory about that, about things that had happened. I even found on YouTube I was writing about this old historic market place in in Kano, Nigeria, and I found a video of someone who was just a tourist and they were walking through that market and the person was videotaping as they were walking through.

And I had been writing about the way the stalls were constructed, but I didn’t have a clear memory of that. And here was this video showing that. So there are so many resources out there that you might not think about initially.

What other research sources are there that you discovered along the way?

Bee: One was, besides the ones I’ve just mentioned, Google Earth, where you can pull up and see the topography and everything of an area that you’re writing about. And if you’re writing about a fairly current event, you can see the buildings and all of this. There’s also now I didn’t discover this until later, so this wasn’t something I used.

But there is a resource, a radio garden, it’s an app you can download free radio garden and you can access radio stations all over the world and hear current news. You can hear the music and all these things. So that was another resource. And maybe at some other time when there’s time to discuss it, I can go into how I organized all of that external resource research and organize that in a way that made sense.

Plus gave me a way to work with it and then winnowed that down as I went along. I had a mentor who was a university professor at the University of Arizona, and she had mentored many Ph.D. candidates through their dissertation. And she’s the one who gave me this method of working with organizing that material.

Lisa: So if somebody is out there and maybe they’re in a similar situation where they’ve lost loved ones who have a bunch of documents that could be made into a story and or a memoir or somebody has adventures in their past they wanted to write about someday. What kind of advice would you give those people?

Bee: I think to start with, I would give them the advice a creative writing group gave me when I walked in. Had I just had the idea I have to write this book, but I didn’t know where to start. I walked into this meetup group and I said, I have all these documents and they said, Just start writing.

Start writing.

And then secure these documents. Make sure that there are copies or whatever. So you’re not going to lose these as time goes on. So that’s one piece of advice. And I would say, you know, just start out, don’t delay, start with it. And I think first of all, I think what does this mean in your life or what kind of story do you want to tell?

What kind of message you want to get across? Kind of think of your central theme, central purpose, I think writing a book or putting these into a some type of a book like framework and think about who you want to do it for. Some people just want to do this for their grandchildren, for example.

But a number of people who start out that way wind up writing a book that becomes a really good book for anybody who has family. One of my fellow critique partners, and says her book is for anybody with ancestors. There are many ways to go about it, but I guess mainly think about your your purpose.

Lisa: So you got a draft together that you were happy with and you got a publisher. Was that a hard process or not so hard?

Bee: Well, you know, I wound up, I sent query letters and so on for a while. But this book is a niche book. I would say it is. I think it’s important in many different areas. There are probably about three large niche audiences for it. Public health, early post-colonial history, African history. And also one of the categories that the book does well in is African tribal guides for some reason.

But, Lisa, I just forgot your main question.

You got the book a publisher.

Bee: I wound up doing a hybrid publishing. I found a publishing company that I was familiar with actually, because I had four fellow writers who published with them. And so I knew the quality of their work. I used a hybrid publisher where and I didn’t mind paying them to aggregate these, these tests that I would have had to find my own editor and formatter and all of these different aspects to actually putting a book physically together.

So I used a Wheatmark Publishing in Tucson, Arizona.

Lisa: That’s good. A lot of people just don’t want to wait any longer. And hybrid publishing is a good option. I think I might do an episode about that soon, actually. So you’ve got your book out there. You’re now using your book for speaking. And so what’s next?

Bee: Well, that’s a great question, Lisa, and I’ve got two answers for that. I will back up a second. When I first started to write the book, I mentioned know your purpose in it may evolve, but excuse me. My purpose initially was just thinking of a much shorter book than what I eventually published.

I was just setting out to tell some stories, some really interesting stories and important stories. And then that grew into a goal to educate. And now, as I especially as I’ve spoken in many different places about my book, it has evolved into a mission to inspire. And now my mission is to inspire one reader, one audience at a time, to find a way to make a difference in the world.

And so that is kind of a new realization for me. And it’s so the book has changed me in that respect. But and what is next now is that I am about to come out with an audiobook version of Vaccines & Bayonets, and I’m just thrilled to death about that.

Lisa: Well, that’s good. Yeah. So I think you even have ideas about the narrator.

Bee: Yes, I have a great narrator, Claudia Dunn. She is a classically trained actor. She’s done voice acting, voice overs, voice, you know, generic book narration. She also does a lot of the audio description for PBS’s Masterpiece shows. She just has great credentials and she’s just super talented and I’m just thrilled to have her doing the narration.

And it’s not going to be too long coming. The master recording is supposed to be ready August 30, 2024, and then about 30 to 45 days after that. It will be available on retail sites all over the world and libraries and so on. So I’m really excited about it.

Lisa: Well, that’s great. I really look forward to that. And because I primarily do my reading through audio, so I’ll look forward to that and I’ll look for your next speaking engagement as well.