Wherever you are on your book writing adventure, you’ll find what you need here…
What to do if you’re just starting out on your Author Adventure: planning, preparation, and dealing with your Inner Dickhead
Let’s hear it for laziness. All because I couldn’t be arsed to take a run-up.
You never know what you might be able to achieve when you simply cannot be bothered.
This is the kind of positivity you can expect from me in the face of inertia. I’ll find a way. I’ll make it fun. We’ll do the thing.
I know writing a book is scary.
I’ve done a lot of scary things. Made a lot of terrifying decisions — and they were the best decisions I ever made.
You already know you want a book out there with your name on.
Maybe you’ve already started it!
Life is made up of these moments.
These moments are how we will save ourselves and each other.
These moments show us that we are more alike than we are different.
Everything I do is about making connections: with you, with myself, with my clients...
I think a lot about saving the world, but the truth is the world will be just fine without us. It'll thrive, actually. I remember hearing David Attenborough say that not so long ago and it caught me like a punch to the stomach.
It’s not really about saving the world. The planet will bounce forward from everything humanity has done to it.
The biggest lesson I learned from jetting off to Antigua for four days is this:
When an opportunity pops up, grab it with both hands and say thank you.
My friend is cabin crew for BA, and he offered me a trip as his guest. Or as a “cling-on” as we’re called — friends and family who sponge off crew for an extremely cheap flight and basically free room.
I was just a woman, standing in front of a herd of cows, asking them to let me pet their noses.
But THEY saw a weird little neon stranger demanding their attention and their velvet faces with no context or guarantee of safety.
It’s like the difference between plopping into someone’s DMs or flinging an ad into their face, and gently offering them your book to sit with.
Will what I’m doing right now matter at all after I’m gone?
I don’t mean whimsy and silliness here, by the way. Those things matter VERY MUCH.
Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it, and while I want to do work that makes people’s lives better, I also want to have a good time with no purpose other than having a good time.
I don’t believe reaching for generative AI to get us through “writer’s block” will help those of us who struggle with executive dysfunction because it doesn’t help us to do the hard thing we want to do; it simply teaches us to reach for the sticking plaster. And please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not talking about the busywork and admin that so many of us struggle with...
It’s actually really easy to change things.
Not the huge things, like stopping orange tyrants from making wars or reversing climate change overnight.
But the small things that lead to the big things — it’s really easy to change those.
Like, people are sad and angry and scared...
George Saunders calls it The Gulp:
“the exciting but harrowing period in the publication of a book when, with the writing all done… the waiting-to-see begins. Will people read it? Will they like it?”
Before they start, everyone thinks that writing the book is the hardest part.
And it is hard. But that’s nothing compared...
Sometimes we just need someone to show us something we can’t quite see ourselves.
My client, this week, told me she’d stalled in writing her book because, in her words, “I don’t want it to be that kind of book.”
She was encountering resistance all over the place and was worried she was “getting it all wrong.”
“What would make it possible?”
And that changed everything.
How about you?
What feels impossible right now, and what might change if instead you asked, “What would make this possible?”
