Photo by Juliette Leufke/unsplash
Question: What’s it like to be a published author?
Answer (How long do you have?):
#1. Awesome.
#3. In retrospect, though, the process is summed up perfectly by Adam Grant, NYTimes best-selling author, professor, and motivation/meaning expert in his popular TedTalk. In it, he discusses the trajectory of any creative project resembling something like this:
This is awesome.
This is tricky.
This is crap.
I am crap.
This might be okay.
This is awesome.
That pretty much covers it — an accurate description of what writing a book was like for me.
Grant asserts that as long as we expect the first few drafts of our creative project to be crap, we can acknowledge and move past the “I am crap” stage without getting stuck there. When we learn to anticipate this line of thinking, along with the inevitable accompanying doubt and insecurity, we can invite it to have a seat right alongside us as we continue plugging away.
Thankfully, I persevered through the phases above, finally landing on “this is awesome.” Creating Breathe, Mama, Breathe has been a wild, wonderful ride and I am grateful for the opportunity to share it with the world. I hope you locals will join me for a book discussion and signing at the Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem Saturday Jan. 28th from 1-3pm to hear more. I would love to see you there!