The Beginning

As I wait for a handful of beta readers to finish reading my manuscript, I keep pinching myself, wondering if this is real. If I am, indeed publishing a real book. Spoiler alert: it is real.

This book has been a dream of mine for years. I’ve started countless Word documents full of genius character and plot ideas, but it was only last year that I became serious about my aspirations to finish one and get it published.

It wasn’t easy sticking with it. I tend to get easily distracted, and there were many days that Starbucks became my accountability partner (with the helpful motivation that a good chai-tea-with-one-pump-vanilla brings).

I would sit in the strangely comfortable chair, listening to the jazz soundtrack that plays slightly too loud, and get in my zone. Tuning out the loud coffee grinders and espresso machines in the background, I just started writing. I’d researched a lot about how other people successfully finished their books, and each one resembled the same message: just write.

Kind of sounds like the Nike catch phrase, doesn’t it? Just do it.

But it’s true. Until I forced myself to let the words out onto a page, my “book” was always going to be an imagined story. Until I put black on white, there was nothing to give to the world. I always knew I would be an author someday. I just had to make ‘someday’ today.

This journey has been incredible so far, and the crazy part is that this is only the beginning!