It Sucked, I Cried, and Then I Went Back to Writing
This is the story of a failed manuscript. I haven’t written a book in six years. That is, I have written several first drafts, but haven’t dived into the 18-24 months process it takes to go from there to a published book. It’s an intimidating proposition and there was always something shiny. Or not shiny,…
Your Life with RA Is On Sale!
It’s January, a month famous — infamous? — for being full of resolutions and decisions to take charge of your life. My Amazon Bestseller Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Tools for Managing Treatment, Side Effects and Pain is your perfect partner in the quest to become empowered and put yourself in the driver’s seat with…
Procrastination
The problem with writing the first book in a series is that eventually, you have to write the second book. Especially as the best way to sell books is to write more books. When you would like your books to someday be your primary source of income so you don’t have to have quite so…
Judging a Book by Its Cover
This is the second post in a series about publishing my book independently. Once I decided to publish Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis independently, the next task was to figure out exactly how to do it. That meant breaking down the process into separate tasks and to figure out what those were, I did a…
Why Go Indie?
When I started writing Your Life with RA, I fully intended to publish the traditional way. Because of the vagaries of my own RA, I didn’t think I could deliver a large manuscript on a deadline, so the idea was to write a book first, then shop it around to an agent or publisher. Decent…
It’s Heeeere…
I’d like to introduce you to the paperback edition of Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis. To differentiate this from the ebook edition, we call it the Book Book. In unguarded moments, I call it My Preciousss. It’s got an incredibly beautiful cover by Dan Handler. The man does magic, transitioning an e-book cover into a…
A Smack Upside the Head
“How do you know when you’re stressed?” Marianna asked this in her most recent giveaway (g’ahead, click and enter, it’s open until May 19). It turns out that my answer is I don’t. It’s been pretty obvious — even to me — that things have been very busy for a long time around here. My…
Meet the Book
Three years ago, I finally went public with a dream. In so doing, I trusted the meds enough, trusted fate, the universe and/or various divinities enough that I could start making a long-term plan. The dream was to have a book with my name on it. And today, I do After a gestation period longer…
Watershed
Sometimes, change happens so gradually that you’re not aware of it until after it’s well underway. And sometimes, you can pinpoint the exact moment your life changed, naeeowing the point down so precisely that the watershed between Before and After is a matter of minutes. On January 7, 2005 at 3:35 PM, I got my…
In Which Writing is Like Living with RA
2 1/2 years. 67,000 words. 268 pages. The Book is done. At approximately 12:37 PM, Saturday, November 17, 2012, I closed down the finalized manuscript. And then I said out loud to no one in particular – Lucy was ignoring me – “I am done.” Well, not entirely done, but it’s now in the hands…
Notes from Editing Hell
And it continues… The editing, I mean. Although I finished writing The Book about six months ago, I am still editing and rewriting and then editing some more. And it is kicking my butt. I take great comfort in reading about other people’s road to publication. It took Toni Bernard six years to write How…
2010 Moby Dick: A Celebration
Saturday evening, at about 8:28pm (OK, at exactly 8:28pm), I finished the first draft of The Book. Cue sparkling confetti falling from the ceiling, popping of champagne corks and triumphant blasts from the horn section in the corner of my living room. You’d think, right? It was, rather to my surprise, what my brain had…