Photo: Having breakfast with my wife and son in our villa in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica
It’s been almost a year to the day since I published my last post on TryFailGrow. Lest you think I’ve been in a cozy, velvet-draped lounge or some chic hookah bar for the past 12 months, sipping the latest ultra-expensive, celebrity-endorsed lava rock-filtered vodka, let me bring you up to speed on what I’ve been up to.
I’ve been writing a book
I’ve never written a book before, and while we were on the road from 2016-2018 the idea kept returning to me like an insistent little puppy: cute and endearing, but a lot of freaking work.
The idea continued to hang around even after we returned to the U.S. and settled in Savannah, GA. Finally, I took a deep breath, cleared time on my schedule for the next 12 months or so, and pulled the trigger, announcing my intentions on Facebook and TryFailGrow in August of 2018.
I created a Facebook group to allow everyone to follow along and participate in the journey, which I was sure was going to include much swearing and quite a few fuckups. Spoiler alert: I was right.
The Early Days
What’s nice about posting a running commentary on a project like this is that I can now go back and laugh, cigar and brandy in hand, at how naive I was.
I sat down to write in mid-August 2018, assuming that I might be able to get a 100-page book straight out of my head. I had been tilting at difficult projects for years – building businesses, training for the CrossFit Games, traveling around the world, and more – with increasing levels of success, and I was certain that I had enough in my head to make an interesting book.
Wrong. I wasn’t even close. 10 days in my tank was empty and I had only written about 10,000 words – anywhere from 20-40 pages, depending on the format of the book. Chastened, I decided that I would go back through my tiny, pathetic little manuscript and see where I could fill in some gaps with research. Some holes were obvious on the first reading. Then I went back and found more. I started scribbling notes and I discovered even more. I realized there were entire disciplines that I would have to digest, and I started devouring books like The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and The Blank Slate. Six days later I admitted my mistake:
September 6, 2018
Day 16: slowing down to do more research. It’s frustrating to not be writing as quickly as I was the first 10 days, but hell, the well is empty and it’s time to fill it again.
Lesson learned. Next time I’ll outline, research exhaustively, revise the outline, THEN write.
I resolved to learn everything I could in order to write the book I was envisioning, which meant several months of research. I settled at my dining room table and read papers from research psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and cognitive scientists. In those sources I discovered more ideas for relevant topics and added them to my list. I ordered dozens of books on education, behavioral psychology, philosophy, and more.
Research, Unhinged
I took notes, quickly got confused about how they were organized, swore loudly enough for the dog to give me a reproachful look, tried reorganizing them, failed, realized that the different programs I was using to organize them were insufficient, and resorted to – gasp! – writing them on index cards.
My son took delight in asking me how many index cards were in the rapidly swelling pile I carried out every morning when I started to work. “About 150?” “Maybe 300?” “Probably around 400, bud.”
And the pile grew. My dining room table was covered with note cards.
I sorted them into categories by topic, realized they made no sense, swore loudly again, apologized to the dog, and started over. I used a program called MindMeister to organize my thinking. I shuffled and clicked and dragged and resorted, sweating in the late autumn Savannah humidity until I had 11 topics that looked like they might be serviceable chapters, a skeleton on which I could hang the thoughts and research I’d been doing.
The research continued. I trudged down to Blick on Broughton Street more times than I can remember, buying single 100-packs of 4×6 cards. Still the stack of notes grew. By December, day 117, I had a table of contents sketched out. I looked at my notes again, wrote a list of all the topics in the table of contents that still needed filling in, and searched for more sources. Chapters started falling into place, one by one.
Finally – Time To Write!
On June 6, 2019 – day 290 – I finished my research. Armed with a stack of 500+ notecards I sat down to finally begin writing again, a little at a time, 30-60 minutes a day, six days a week. I was nervous as hell. What if after all that research I wasn’t able to write anything? What if the words didn’t come? Could I just quietly delete the Facebook group, pretend I never foolishly announced I was writing a book, and return to mornings spent at the gym in blissful ignorance?
“Screw that,” I thought. “Let’s just take this one day at a time.”
I started by taking the note cards for a chapter and flipping through them, sorting them by subtopics – what I assumed would be sections in each chapter – and I kept doing so, shuffling and reshuffling, and labeling each section. Then I opened Scrivener, created a new folder for the chapter, added a file for the section (which I decided to name simply “1”, “2”, “3”, etc to avoid coming up with crappy titles for the sections in advance) and then I flipped through the notes for the section, slowly absorbing each one, remembering the context of the source, and proceeding to the next note until a narrative started to form in my head. Then I set the cards down and started writing.
On average I managed 500-1,000 words a day. Some days the writing would flow and the ideas came easily. Other days, quite frankly, sucked. It was like wrestling a huge, sweaty guy with bad breath: I would engage, break away in disgust at what I’d written, jump back in determined to grind it out, stumble back again with a muttered “Fuck this,” and do it all again.
I pressed on, though, day after day, updating the Facebook group every few days. Finally, on November 15, 2019 – day 463 – I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Totaling 80,888 words (Scrivener smugly informed me this is 232 paperback pages) over 11 chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, it is the longest thing I’ve ever written, and though I haven’t read it through yet, I’m 100% sure that it’s an unholy mess.
What Now?
Once I finished the draft I promptly stuck it in a drawer for a few weeks , as suggested by my close friend Stephen King, in order to get some distance from it. Now I’m in the process of figuring out how to publish it using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service, and just as importantly, puzzle out how to promote the book so I sell more than just the three copies my mother is sure to buy. Thanks Mom!
It’s been two weeks and publishing seems pretty straightforward. Not easy, mind you, but straightforward. KDP requires the manuscript be formatted in a particular way, which isn’t rocket science but will take some time. I’ll also need to get myself a good editor and a cover illustrator.
Promoting the book is going to be much more complicated. So far I’ve taken a few pages of notes on promotion strategies and tactics, from keyword research to writing guest posts to building a street team to stalking Oprah at her favorite deli, throwing myself at her feet, and begging her to add her sticker to my book.
I have another couple of days to add strategies and tactics to the pile, and then I’m going to go back through all of those notes, try to work out the 20% of them that might give me 80% of the results I want (because I can’t possibly do them all) and put that 20% into a plan. Then I’ll run the plan by a couple of people I trust, schedule a little time each week to work on it, and then it should be time to take another deep breath, pull the draft out of the drawer, and start revisions.
I don’t know what is going to hurt more, revising the pile of mental spaghetti that is my manuscript or pounding on doors and building and audience for my book. Both are going to be hard as hell, and both are going to give me many “what the fuck?!?” moments . I’m sure I’m going to be asking myself every other day why I’m not back in Mauritius, drinking rum on a beach.
I’ve come this far, though, and I have a feeling that what lies on the other side is worth all the suck. In the meantime, keep checking TryFailGrow for more updates on the book’s progress. I appreciate you coming along for the ride.