The Seated View

The problem with writing the first book in a series is that eventually, you have to write the second book. Especially as the best way to sell books is to write more books. When you would like your books to someday be your primary source of income so you don’t have to have quite so much of a day job (and therefore more time to write books), getting going is a good idea. But I’ve had the hardest time doing that. And not just because it's hard to write when Lucy insists on "helping."   Initially, there was the quite understandable reveling in Having A Book Out and I spent a lot of time promoting the book on blog tours and the like. Whenever I talked about starting the next book, people who love me would do an intervention and tell me to enjoy Having a Book out. So I did. Then I picked up another freelance gig at the start of last summer, fully knowing that this would take away any time I’d otherwise have to write the book. I was okay with that — by that ...

This is the second post in a series about publishing my book independently.   Once I decided to publish Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis independently , the next task was to figure out exactly how to do it. That meant breaking down the process into separate tasks and to figure out what those were, I did a lot of research. Throughout my reading of numerous books — David Gaughran’s Let's Get Digital is fantastic — and more blogs than you can shake a stick at, two things became evident. One, indie authors are incredibly generous with sharing their experience and advice. And two, although you can learn to do a number of things yourself, there are two aspects of publishing a book for which you should hire a professional: cover design and editing. Both of these are essential to the first impression of your book by presenting a professional, high-quality product. Because if you plan to make a living from writing, you intend to be a professional and as such, there are things yo...

When I started writing Your Life with RA, I fully intended to publish the traditional way. Because of the vagaries of my own RA, I didn't think I could deliver a large manuscript on a deadline, so the idea was to write a book first, then shop it around to an agent or publisher. Decent plan, right? About halfway through the writing process, a revolution happened. E-book readers and tablets took off, Amazon started their Kindle Direct Publishing program and writers started doing it themselves. I was aware of it, but still really locked into my original plan. Then on an evening in early 2012, The Boy and I had a conversation. As he is always way more ahead on technological issues than I am, he’d been nudging me for a while about publishing The Book as an e-book myself and I had been resisting. I had been doing some reading, though, and apparently, there’d been a significant degree of percolating going on in the back of my head. It all came together in that January discussion ...

I'd like to introduce you to the paperback edition of Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis. To differentiate this from the ebook edition, we call it the Book Book. In unguarded moments, I call it My Preciousss .  It's got an incredibly beautiful cover by Dan Handler . The man does magic, transitioning an e-book cover into a wrap-around Book Book cover that has flow and cohesion.  Publishing a book requires an endless number of decisions, one of which was about the font we should use. We needed to find one that happened in the background, making the text easy to read, yet fit the book and me equally. We finally narrowed it down to a couple of options, one of which was called Minion Pro. I wanted to use it just for the name alone, but it also happens to be the one that works the best. This tickles me to no end. Once we found the font, The Boy set to formatting the interior. E-book formatting doesn't work in Book Book edition, so we had to rework it substantially. Da...

"How do you know when you're stressed?" Marianna asked this in her most recent giveaway (g’ahead, click and enter, it's open until May 19). It turns out that my answer is I don't. It's been pretty obvious — even to me — that things have been very busy for a long time around here. My level of activity was already fairly up there and then the book came out. Which lead to a blog tour - exciting, fun and wonderful, but also a fair amount of work. There was getting the manuscript ready for the paperback version, the opportunity to write for CreakyJoints — also exciting and wonderful — planning for May’s Arthritis Awareness Month on RAHealthCentral, exciting and interesting planning going on at Show Us Your Hands! , several community projects that were also very interesting, I started writing Book Two in the Your Life with RA series and I could go on. Won't, though. It's stressing me out just to think about it again. Suffice it to say that it all ...

Three years ago, I finally went public with a dream . In so doing, I trusted the meds enough, trusted fate, the universe and/or various divinities enough that I could start making a long-term plan. The dream was to have a book with my name on it. And today, I do . After a gestation period longer than an elephant’s, my baby is finally ready to see the day. To meet you. To meet the world and see what the world says. That part is a bit nerve-racking.  Well, to be honest, all of it is more than a bit nerve-racking. There’s a really big difference between sitting quietly at my desk dictating words into a document and then putting it all together and offering it up for sale on Amazon .  Nonetheless, that’s what I’ve done. It also has a beautiful new website .  Three years ago, the idea started out as a book about how to live well with rheumatoid arthritis. Because having RA is about so much more than a physical disease. As is the case wi...

Sometimes, change happens so gradually that you’re not aware of it until after it’s well underway. And sometimes, you can pinpoint the exact moment your life changed, naeeowing the point down so precisely that the watershed between Before and After is a matter of minutes. On January 7, 2005 at 3:35 PM, I got my first shot of Enbrel. I went home to have a nap and when I woke up at 6 PM, I was a different person. I could feel the drug working . It took weeks, months and years to get stronger – the amazing thing is that today, 8 years later, I am still getting stronger – but that’s the moment. January 7, 2005 at 3:35 PM is my watershed. I often refer to it as The Miracle, capital letters and all, because that's what it was to me. I write about it often, because I think of it often. I believe that when you are the recipient of something so profound as the gift of life, it should be honoured. And I talk about it, too, because I am proof of the reason to hope that even the mos...

2 1/2 years. 67,000 words. 268 pages. The Book is done. At approximately 12:37 PM, Saturday, November 17, 2012, I closed down the finalized manuscript. And then I said out loud to no one in particular - Lucy was ignoring me - "I am done." Well, not entirely done, but it’s now in the hands of my copy editor for a final ripping apart. I'm kind of excited to see how well my instinctive approach to grammar stands up. And it's weird. It is really, really weird to be done. For so long, it has been about finishing one chapter or one section and then picking up another, being done, but never Done. And now that I am, there is this odd, restless silence, both in my head, my heart and my apartment (I keep expecting confetti and marching bands, but so far it hasn't happened except through lovely digital pictures and cards with confetti from friends). Wait… what’s that? Ah. There they are That’s better. Anyway, so there I was, flailin...

    And it continues… The editing, I mean. Although I finished writing The Book about six months ago, I am still editing and rewriting and then editing some more. And it is kicking my butt. I take great comfort in reading about other people's road to publication. It took Toni Bernard six years to write How to Be Sick  (if you haven't already, join RA Guy’s book club reading Toni’s book – it’s a great way to read a terrific book). Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit , has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and it took her 10 years to write her award-winning book. David Gaughran, author of A Storm Hits Valparaiso , took five or six years to finish his novel and has detailed his struggles with the never-ending edits and rewrites on his excellent blog . These stories reassure me that I am not a hopeless slacker or so incompetent that I really need to stop any thoughts of publishing a book. In related news, going through your book over and over and over again with...