Many of you have asked what it’s like to write a book. G talked a little bit about our experience when she let the cat out of the bag a few weeks ago.
We thought we would share a little more about what the process of simply deciding to write a book was like for us.  It’s a little like you might imagine.  I liken it to throwing darts…blind folded.  Sometimes we hit the board, but a lot of those beginning months felt like total misses. The one thing we had going for us was that we were already writing 5 days a week so the writing part wasn’t completely foreign.  The hard part was that we were already writing 5 days a week and what else do we have to talk about?

Let me start at the beginning though. G and I had been wanting to write a book for quite some time.  It had been sitting on our buckets lists just staring at us for years.  When we began our blog back in 2013 it was a jumping point.  We knew we had to start somewhere and blogging seemed like the best avenue to work on our skills while also testing our ability to write more than a few pages. Hitting publish on that first blog was scary. What if the world or, in our case, the five people we told we were writing a blog, didn’t like it?  What if nobody read it?

You can imagine that the prospect of writing a book brought on a fear that was exponentially greater. We wrangled in that giant abyss of fear for awhile and then G called one day and said she knew someone who was a book editor that might be able to help us move forward.  I can still remember that phone call and how anxious I felt.  We were literally deciding whether we were going to go for it.  We kept saying, “So, we are doing this?  Are you sure?  Yes, let’s do it.”  This went on for several rounds before G said she was calling the book editor and leaving a message before we could change our minds.

Later, that same week we met with Heather who soon became way more than an editor to us. As we say in our acknowledgements, we would still be emailing each other funny stories if it wasn’t for Heather.  She skillfully and patiently helped us get from point A to point Z.  She was there for us when we didn’t know what to write and couldn’t write.  There were many days when we were getting ready to meet with her that we had no idea what we were even going to discuss because we were stuck and without fail Heather would have a list of things for us to accomplish and by the end of the call we would have renewed enthusiasm for our project.

Getting started with anything is difficult and writing a book proved no less daunting.  We began this process in what seemed like a good time in our lives.  We soon realized there is never a good time to start anything; a job, a new workout routine, and definitely not a big project.  If it’s important to you though, you forge on through those trying times until one day you wake up and you have made it to the other side.  I couldn’t have done it without G and that is my takeaway from this experience.  If you are going to start something big, make sure you have someone else in your corner because some days you are going to want to quit.  You need that other person there to help pick you up or, in our case, someone who will say, “put on your big girl pants and get going you big sissy!”

Sunshine & Sarcasm,

Lowi & G