I'm Writing a Book

Taking the old and turning it into something new

Photo by Daria Kraplak on Unsplash

In Writing the Journey, I write about writing. I share my travel and personal experiences through writing in a lot of contexts, but I also strive to achieve more as a writer. This is where I reflect on that process.

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Well, I’m kind of writing a book.

More like, I’m taking old blog pieces, adding a few new ones, and turning them into a book that makes sense.

I love all genres of writing, but in the last few years, my favorite nonfiction writing has come in the form of essays. In Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green presents essays meant to both inform and reflect on personal experiences. In Wholehearted Faith, Rachel Held Evans left us her last unpublished reflections on life and faith. In Learning to Speak God From Scratch, Jonathan Merritt combines both personal experience and the scholarship around those experiences. Essays, so it seems, are having their moment in publishing.

I came to realize that after ten years of blogging about everything under the sun, I might actually have enough material to put into a book of my own.

But when you have a full-time job and a family that needs your presence, the thought of pursuing traditional publishing becomes incredibly daunting. This is especially true because the real reason I want to put my blog posts into print is that I want to have them preserved in print for me and my children. I became inspired to consider independent publishing after my uncle finished my grandmother’s own memoir shortly before she died. Her children and grandchildren and someday her great-grandchildren, now have a record of her life from her childhood through well into adulthood. While she had a stroke before she was able to make it as complete as she wanted to, her years of copious letter writing and diary keeping gave her the material she needed to remember even the most minute details from her past.

I wanted to pass along the same gift to my own children.

I also knew that I had a lot to say and that I wanted those words to be polished after time and experience had given me more space for reflection. I wanted to make those words available for a wider audience than might read my blog. And I wanted to do it sooner than later.

So instead of waiting to go through the arduous process of an increasingly narrow publishing world, I decided to make my first venture into publishing an independent one. And that brings me to this moment and the decision to focus on a singular project: a collection of my blog posts dealing with the changes of life and finding the beauty in the mess.

When you're an avid reader and write for yourself and others, you have a lot of ideas floating around. I currently have fifteen blog post ideas in my drafts folder. But I also know that I need to finish a project, so I'm starting with this one. My hope is to have it completed by the end of the year and published at the beginning of 2023. And I will be filling you in with updates here.

So I hope you’ll join me on one more exciting journey that I’m sure will be full of its own twists and turns. And please share it with anyone who you think would appreciate it.

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