I’m a writer.  I write technical documents for work and volumes of personal musings for myself.  I’ve also written a book-  50,000 words slammed together a decade ago as part of National Novel Writing Month.  I’ve never read it.  Writing the book was a project- a temporary endeavor.  When I accomplished the goal, the project was done, and I filed the book away as “complete”.

But lately I’ve been thinking about my book lately in the context of habits and goals.  The end point- writing X number of words by the end of November- isn’t the natural endpoint of a book.  It is at best a midpoint.  Next comes editing, workshopping, ???  I actually have no idea.  National Novel Writing Month was a huge amount of fun.  More importantly, it provided a framework (write X words in X time) that was easy to follow and easy to win. (Yes, I like to win.  No, that isn’t the point of NaNoWriMo.  Writing that much in a month is tough, but the endpoint is so close and so clear, it is pretty easy to power through to the end.

There is a lot of contradictory information out there about what to do next.  So,  I thought I would document my experience as I complete my book.  I’ll be looking at a lot of different resources ranging from traditional books to Reddit.  I’ll post my reviews of the resources here on the blog, and I’ll also let you know how things go as I progress.  I hope that this blog will be a useful resource for others when they decide to publish their books as well.

Along the way, I’ll digress and talk about habits, productivity, “side hustles”, and whatever else I try to apply to my life.   The end goal is a peaceful, productive, and creative life.  Getting there might be rocky, but hopefully I’ll find some tips and tricks that can make the next person’s life a bit smoother.