I love James Altucher and his book Choose Yourself. He suggests a daily practice of making lists to keep your creativity and ideas flowing. He posted a challenge to his social media followers to write a short book in a weekend based on one of these lists. Challenge accepted!
You can follow 10 Ideas to Work Yourself to Death as a manual if you would like to run yourself into the ground…or you can do the opposite if you would like some balance in your life.
This book was unplanned! I rented a hotel room for a couple days to work on some short stories set in Asheville that had been bouncing around in my brain for several months.
I sat down with my notebook and pen to write, and the characters of the Asheville short stories were not what flowed onto the pages. Instead, essays and thoughts around love came tumbling out.
When I finally put the pen down, I didn’t have what I expected at all. I also had a weird feeling about it, like I needed to do something with this pile of words.
Driving back home from the hotel, I decided I would type everything up and publish it on Amazon as Love Unstitched. It felt cathartic to publish it, like by posting it online, I was putting some ugly feelings down and walking away from them.
Those Asheville short stories still aren’t finished, even after all this time. I pick them up, noodle around a bit, then put them back down. I may revive that project, or like so many projects, it may rest half-written in one of my zillions of spiral notebooks.
This was my first book on Amazon. When I put Truth and Fiction in Ashevegas together, I was trying to learn how self-publishing worked. I wanted to understand how to get a book on Amazon. I learn best by doing, so I put this small book together and started the process. It didn’t take long to get it uploaded and approved; the turnaround time was shorter than I expected.
This one was available as an eBook and as a print book. When I held a copy of this book in my hands for the first time, it was an amazing feeling! I felt on top of the world.
It was also a thrill to see it on Amazon. I was a published author on Amazon! Woohoo!