Posts tagged with 'book'

A book as a marker to a new life.

  • Posted on February 8, 2010 at 9:49 pm

 

I guess one of the perks of having a blog is that you can toot your own horn. Blogs by nature seem to be self-involved and thats what makes them so fun.  For me, at least, it’s like living vicariously through someone else’s life.  I get to forget about my own head space  for awhile and play in someone else’s world.

My world right now is about books.  Specifically, my book, Ghosts of Central Arizona.  The past few weeks have been filled with reading about book marketing and then implementing the tips and tricks into my own book campaign.  It’s exhausting and fun at the same time. With the internet in full motion there are so many more opportunities to get your book out there.  Still, you have to know how to utilize it to work in your best interest.  Slowly, but surely, I am learning what and what not to do.

At the same time I am trying to write my second book. For some reason I am having a harder time with it.  Mostly because I am so worried about selling the first. It seems to be taking up a lot of brain matter.  However, with a deadline pressed upon me the words seem to come that much quicker.  Plus, I have been writing more in the last year and so it takes me less time to put my thoughts into coherent sentences.  I love that the process goes that much quicker with practice.

Still, time seems to ticking away as I work on my marketing plan and write a book and keep the house clean and the laundry done. Thank the goddess for my boyfriend who is house-cleaning and laundry friendly.  I still do most of the cooking but at least our house doesn’t look like it would if I was in charge.  We would live in a rat’s nest of stacked papers and tarot decks and piles of shoes. I am one of those people who instantly takes off their shoes the very minute I get into the house.  So, they are strewn about in the place they happen to fall. Regularly, I have tripped on my own shoes.

Luckily, I am still trainable and I have tripped enough to try and keep my shoe-taking-off to the corners of rooms and the edges of walls to keep myself from having a direct relationship with the floor.  I wonder if that is a Pisces trait or a writer’s trait or if I am just tuned-in to my own little world.  Probably, all three.

Still, even though I am immersed in all things books, I feel very blessed.  Since I was a teenager I have always wanted to write books. In college I studied Journalism and spent my time traveling to write stories for the college newspaper.  I loved it.  Then life happened.  I had a child at 23 and focused on him.  Then more life happened and I got a “real” job.  Marriage happened and then the dreaded divorce.  Life went up and then plummeted like the 1929 crash of the stock market.

Sometimes life’s downs can be life lessons if they are applied correctly.  So, I moved to another state.  It’s a decision that I am not sure how or why I made.  I mean I remember making it.  However, the details are foggy because it was so weird.  It was like a had a calling and I just did it – no thinking involved whatsoever.  I am still on-the-fence about whether is the best thing I ever did or my worst mistake.

However, in my new state I did find that I could be a new person.  The cliche’ starting over.  I queried my publisher exactly three weeks after moving.  If I was going to leave everything at least I was going to do it being a writer.  Lucky for me my non-thinking-faith-is-the-answer approach worked.  Then the thinking started again and the last two years have been life-lesson-central.

I can’t say that I am unhappy.  Or that I didn’t learn a lot from the past two years.  I will say that I am glad that they are over.  So, this book, in a way, is my rite of passage.  It’s was the start of my new life.  A life that I am still working on making better.  Still, I had 34 years to work on Heather V1.0.  Maybe I will give myself more time to fit into a more successful, happier, and prosperous Heather 2.0.

Okay, that was just weird.  I talked about myself in the third person with all that “version” categorizing.  I guess the point of this blog post is that in a way I am tooting my own horn by talking about my book.  And I think everyone should buy a copy because it’s an interesting read.  It’s about hauntd locations and psychic investigating and all kinds of other fun stuff.  But what I am also trying to convey is that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.  It’s not easy and there are lots of habits and thought-patterns that you have to break; but it’s worth it.  I would not trade anything in the world to be the unhappy divorced person I was two years ago.  A chance at happiness far outweighs complacency…

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