I am currently in the middle of writing a book. Or ‘middling’ - as it is sometimes called in the writing world. This is the point of the book writing process where you see a nightmarish landscape of jagged, foreboding mountains laid out before you during a swirling storm, and you must traverse all of it if you ever wish to see, somewhere on the horizon, the fabled, glimmering, heavenly, yet taunting, End of the Book. This is the point where you realise you will indeed pay with your sweat, blood, and tears - just like all of those authors whose advice you read forewarned - before finally making it to the end of the story, only to be greeted by an unforgiving ‘final editing process ogre’ holding his stopwatch and tapping his massive foot, demanding even more of your time and patience.

If all of that isn’t challenging enough, I am an unpublished writer who has never attempted to write or publish much of anything. In fact, I’m a complete amateur who decided to get back into writing as a hobby less than a year ago.

When I read about authors who speak about their life experiences writing books, it’s always disappointing when they get to the point where they wrote their first book and say “… and the rest is history!” or “Long story short, I published my first book and things got better”. I don’t know if published writers completely erase that time period from their psyche, but it sure seems like it: the part where they struggled through many different approaches and beat themselves up sleepless night after sleepless night before finally managing to spill their soul out onto the pages that would become their first book. How about what they went through getting rejection letter after rejection letter before they finally let the information from all of those negative critiques sink in, and surrendered to accepting that their book may have needed more work than they were readily willing to admit before finally getting published? Maybe they are embarrassed by it, or maybe they just feel it’s no longer important to revisit that dark part of their lives after they ‘made it’ … but, to me, the crucial transition phase between ‘unpublished writer’ and ‘published writer’ is exactly what I’m interested in reading about. It’s when the most is at stake for the wannabe author - where something magical happened. Something ‘clicked’. Something was done right for the first time in their craft, creating a turning point in their lives for the better - the moment where they proved all those naysayers wrong and quit their day jobs for good and got propelled to a caliber many people dream of but very few ever attain. It’s that point where they did something that worked, allowing them to finally overcome the countless storms and mountains and somehow fly above the storm clouds into holy heights instead of fall to an ugly death.

That’s what I’m interested in reading.

More than anything, I wish to take this foray into book writing not just seriously, but take it many steps beyond what I believe I am capable of. In order to help me persevere through this challenge that screams to be met, I thought it would be a good idea to keep a record of my creative process explaining why I’ve come to the decisions I’ve made along the way, and to report my progress.

In short, I want to share my blood, sweat, and tears with you.

This is also my effort to preserve these moments in my life instead of mentally erase them. If I ever do become successful, maybe coming back and reading this will help me keep a firm grip on my humility. And who knows? Maybe along the way, my doing this will benefit somebody else out there, too.

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