Calendar icon designed by Phil Goodwin from The Noun Project collection
Shortly after the launch of my book BROKEN: Navigating the ups and downs of the circus called work, my co-writer Stephanie Di Biase tweeted, “it’s been a long time in the making :)”. As I mentioned in the book’s announcement, while the idea for the book was noted on June 30, 2010, the actual writing didn’t start until November 21, 2010. The gap between committing to the idea and actually beginning to write it will be a subject for a separate post.
When the ideation of BROKEN started, I documented my time. From November 21, 2010, through December 3, 2012, I completed my preliminary version of the manuscript—seven chapters. The Introduction, Credits, Colophon, and other sections, were written afterwards. Over the course of three years, I did not write every day, or even every week. At some points, I skipped a month or more. After that, there was a year of not visiting the project at all.
My timeline for writing the book can be broken (pun intended) into parts: minimal at the start (November 21, 2010–March 2, 2012), then aggressive (April 29, 2012–December 1, 2012). The minimal phase was partially affected by my original co-writer leaving the project for parenthood. The aggressive phase was energized by the discovery of, pitching to, then joining by new co-writer Stephanie.
Since BROKEN began as a joint writing project, I didn’t want to break this arrangement, especially after my original co-writer left. Working with another person not only makes the time go faster, it also makes the process feel more productive.
To Stephanie’s point, it took quite a while to complete BROKEN. Evaluating a project’s duration as long can mean that the project was drawn out. It can also mean that the effort was slow. In this project’s case, it was both: drawn out and slow. I’m not complaining—that’s just how the process unfolded. There were residual feelings of impatience and anxiety. In looking back, these feelings were relatively tamed by sticking to the vision that this book will ultimately result in a completed state. What made this sticking-to-it lasting, was, again in retrospect, faith. Time will tell if a project will ever finish. In BROKEN’s case, faith helped to see it through to launch.
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Speaking of time, it took me three hours to write this post.
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This is the first post, after the launch of BROKEN, that reflects on how this book was made. More to come in this series about aspects related to writing and self-publishing.
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Originally published at Acme Pride, Design Feast’s former blog dedicated to striving and writing.
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