This week I made substantial writing progress on my Big Sur book. I’m still behind schedule, but I’m just barely beginning to see a hint of light at the end of the tunnel. I also ran monthly royalties for our authors, did some editing work on a couple of books by other authors, helped coordinate between the author and editor of yet another book, and did the usual array of publisher-y tasks. However, I made no progress on my master Take Control to-do list, which stands at 95 items.
Because there are so many variables and moving pieces with our in-progress titles, I can’t even tell you with certainty which book(s) we’ll release in the next 10 days. I can, however, tell you that we will definitely be releasing at least one book, and possibly as many as five books, before the end of August!
Although our customers only see progress when we put a new book on our website or send out email, I can see significant forward motion in a bunch of important areas. Most importantly for me, a bunch of things in both business and personal realms have been unexpectedly coming into focus recently. It’s like one of those optical illusions where you stare at a grid of random-looking dots for five minutes, and all of a sudden you realize you’re looking at a 3D image of a giraffe, clear as day. It was there all along, but your brain had to figure out how to assemble the pattern.
This has happened before. For example, in the mid-2000s my wife and I spent years talking almost every day about how some things in our life just weren’t right, but we couldn’t figure out what to do about them, and we just kept going around in loops. Then one day, out of the blue, Morgen said, “I think we need to move to Paris.” And I almost immediately realized that was precisely the correct way for us to deal with what was dragging us down at that time. It took about a year and a half to pull it off, but we did, and we ended up living in France for over five years.
We’re not talking about moving back to Paris now, but I’m just saying that sometimes a novel solution to a problem becomes apparent, spontaneously, only after it has had enough time to percolate in one’s subconscious. So I’m finally starting to get a picture of what things might look like (with Take Control Books and otherwise) in another year or two, and the outline of a plan is coalescing in a way that has eluded me for some time. It could be pretty cool.
In the meantime, I have an absurd amount of writing, editing, and publishing to do in the next several months! Time to get back to it.