After spending nearly 5 years (or maybe even more) trying to finish writing a book based on already documenting my life through a couple of blogs on food and travel since 2009, I haven’t been able to take on the monstrous beast that it is to complete it. I’ve gone in waves, starting and stopping, getting extra ambitious at times and being extremely anal with scheduling in writing time for several months, setting up writing accountability partners, to taking glimpses of my transcript and then quickly closing it again. The gaps between writing has run from days or weeks to well over a year. At one point, I had even been researching and shortlisting editors to help me take what was this baby for me to it’s finish but never ended up pulling the trigger on my favourite option (and that was almost 3 years ago now).
Many things “stopped me” – getting too busy with growing my business, Umami Marketing, fun times with more and more competitive beach volleyball, connecting with people, traveling around and exploring new places – the excuses were rampant and not difficult to find. I also knew that I wanted to create something a little different – more of a workbook that wasn’t a common thing – the idea was to share my stories, but then to also create a space after each section to allow for reflection and writing by the reader, based on how I broke up the chapters to follow principles that I try to live by and the related experiences I’ve had. It was planned to be a combination between a book and a journal of sorts, and didn’t follow the traditional publishing styles.
Well, on my goals that I wrote down at the beginning of this year, AGAIN, I added that I wanted to publish my book, or at least write it to completion to the point where it could be published, should I choose to do so (the goal has gotten more softer recently, each time I revisit it).
So, here I am, deciding to try something a little different, and follow my own advice in order to take baby steps and actually get this creation out into the world.
Over the following months, I’ll begin to finish off each section in some way, to a point where I will at least publish a new article here each week, amongst other travel and life related posts.
So feel free to follow along, and hopefully you’ll get as much out of what I share as I do myself in the process.
Photo by Jonas Jacobsson