Update on our forthcoming workbook

We thought it might be fun to share some of our experiences in writing this workbook. Writing and publishing a book is seems to be an iterative process where we keep running into ourselves in unexpected ways, bumping up against beliefs that we might not have previously been fully aware of. Here are my reflections this month:

Now that we are fully in the process of working with editors from New Harbinger Publishing, I find myself wondering how attached I should be to every word. First, you need to know that I’m dyslexic. My strongest emotional memories of school are of teachers bleeding red ink all over my papers. “Great concept: Poor grammar. You must do a draft!” even though I always did multiple drafts. Second, Natasha loves constructing sentences, so I have her backing me up.  The process we have co-developed is that I do content and she weaves it into something useful. However, I can tell I am struggling with what I think it means to be a writer.  Will a writer fight for every word, every detail? I trained in Aikido for 22 years to learn that I cannot control every detail, I can only choose my direction or intention. Can this be true for writer? Is this just true?

Like the tenets of my medicine, I do value just showing up in my inconsistently consistent way. I value trying and failing and trying again with more knowledge. I have learned that what’s more important to me in this process is that I like myself while I’m in the midst of it rather than revisiting how I used to hate myself for my sentence structure and spelling. I realize that this should be an additional tenet: I want the readers of our book to do just a little better with food, sleep, and exercise and still like themselves. And as I ask them to risk the unknown, I will also take risks in areas that are hard for me, and keep to liking myself for doing it.