Beyond 30: The Next Chapters

So, you may have read that I am writing a book ( here are the first unedited paragraphs if you were interested ) and so far the process has been a bit..well..intimidating. Over the last couple of weeks, I've taken a half a dozen writing/publishing workshops online and while these have proved very useful, it's evident that I've got a lot of work to do if I want to be a successful and more importantly published writer. It's not as though I was expecting this entire process to be easy because if it were, everyone would publish a book. There is, however, a lot more to it than I originally anticipated. Writers are not merely conveyors of a story; they are, at their heart, marketing gurus (which I am not). Selling a book also means selling your platform, building an audience, and connecting with the core of people that you want to read your story.  So, that's what I'll have to do.  And I kind of hate it.  I am really not much of a social media person. Over the years, ...

It has been almost two weeks since I made the possibly harebrained decision to write a novel instead of going back to work and the results so far are...mixed. Though I've taken a few writing workshops in the pursuit of sharpening up my dusty skills, it's apparent to me that I might be a bit in over my head. The process for publishing a novel is unsurprisingly not as simple as write a book, pitch a book, sell a book and then bang, boom money. Man, I wish it worked that way.  Initially, I gave myself a deadline of finishing up a rough draft by January and as I'm working on this novel, hammering out the rough outline of a story that I think others would want to read, I'm realizing that both my deadline and general plan are starting to look a bit unrealistic. When this idea first came to me, it seemed an obvious path forward: document my journey getting healthy, write the story, find an agent, sell my book. Now, I've taken a handful of writing workshops, penned the firs...