A book is coming..
(at least, that's what I'm manifesting!)
There’s something about saying it out loud that makes it feel terrifyingly real. But the truth is, I’ve been working on a book for what feels like years now. It has evolved through several different iterations as I’ve struggled to weave each thread together—but in the last six months or so, its structure has finally started to make sense. Each piece of the jigsaw feels clear in my mind, and somehow, amongst the absolute chaos of life, things have started to take shape.
Despite working as a writer for the best part of 15 years, and having written countless pieces of long-form content for other people—including, funnily enough, books—I’ve never quite managed to get out of my own way for long enough to sit with an idea, flesh it out properly and see it through. And despite the shame of admitting this out loud, I also know I’m not alone in this.
If you were to mine the contents of any writer’s notes app, you’d be met with a whole collection of half-started sentences and ideas not-quite-fully-formed. While I can only speak to my own experience, the truth is, I’ve always got at least 10 pieces of half-finished articles, blogs or ideas that require my attention and although a few are lucky enough to see the light of day, especially if I can convince my editors to commission a story, most of them do not.
In the process of trying to get my narrative clear for my book, I decided recently that it was time I finally went through my many (many!) notes and arranged them in some sort of sensical fashion. But as is always the case with well-intentioned administrative projects, this took far longer than the hour I had set aside, and instead I had to return to the task again and again over the course of many weeks in order to make sense of all the words I’d written. Many of them were sort of journal-like in their tone, and these were the bits I desperately needed to keep safe for the book. But many were business ideas that never came to life, to-do lists that certainly never got finished, funny things my kids have said that I’d obviously wanted to keep in memory, and many, many lists of books I’ve read.
Finally, however, I managed to shuffle everything away in its rightful place, and now there is a more considered cloud-based system where I know to save anything that might be useful in the future.
With all the sorting, well, sorted, the actual writing had to begin. And honestly, it’s been a very lonely process. When you’re working on something you believe in but have no outward proof yet that it’s going to be useful to anyone else, imposter syndrome sets in quickly. So far only a couple of people have read any of the words that belong in this book, and while I trust them implicitly, they also already know my story as they’ve been witness to it in real time. They’re invested which also means they have a personal interest, really, in seeing it succeed. That’s a kind of comfort, but it isn’t quite proof.
And despite being firmly type A in almost every other area of my life, I’ll admit it: I have really, really struggled to prioritise this project even though it’s the one thing I want to complete more than anything else. So recently, I did something about it. I booked a mentoring session.
Having to explain out loud, to someone who holds no prior context, what my book is about including why it matters, and why I think it needs to exist in the world, was confronting. The words were hard to find but watching someone with no stake in my story recognise that it might just be something real felt validating in a way the reassurance of people who love me never quite could. And now, I have homework to do.
Because here’s the uncomfortable thing… I can’t control whether this book eventually makes it into your hands. I can’t even control whether I’ll get the right people to read it. But I can control whether it gets written. And there is a lot left to write.
So all this is to say: putting it down here makes me feel a little more accountable. To myself, and to you.
