What’s He Building in There #4

In the last few weeks I have published “Values Count“, after a long haul figuring out how to produce a paperback book. Some achievement I think, although I am only now emerging from being mauled by the Inner Critic beast (ICB for short) that ran loose for a couple of weeks after the book came out. It was a total surprise this. I expected to feel good about achieving a goal – to publish a book. But instead the ICB shifted the goal post and started monitoring my stats. Each sale I achieved of the book was turned into a target 10 times that by the ICB. I’m not exaggerating when I talk about being mauled. It was a hideous experience. It felt like a scene from a Harry Potter movie running in my head with a monster on the loose. Yes, really! I have read loads of books by Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield about the inner critic and about resistance. Both of them talk about how awful the process can be. I had always thought that they were exaggerating to make a point. I was so so wrong!

Over the last few days I have been reviving the shop feature on this website to enable direct purchase for anyone who doesn’t want to use Amazon. It took some doing as the function that I set up a few years ago was no longer working on mobile platforms (phones and tablets) so I had to completely replace it with a new shop function. It is working now – needs a bit of refining but I am really pleased with how this looks as it enables me to post things directly. It’s the next step from blogging to direct publishing.

I am in the throes of making available the other digital publications that are on the site through the shop so that they are easier to find. That should take a week or so.

In other publishing news (as they say on the radio!) I am reaching the final stages of producing the limited edition of “Blue: experiments in sound” which is illustrated by Phillip Kingsbury of Wooden Spoon Press. This will be an illustrated poetry collection including all of the poems from the 2016 Blue poetry sequence. I’m thinking that the book will also include a CD version of the sound pieces which I made to accompany this collection. It should be ready within a few short weeks.

Then at the end of the month I have time set aside for another Writing Marathon. Lots of you were interested in the last one of these that I did and enjoyed me blogging as I progressed. So, I will live blog this exercise again. At the moment I have three book ideas to work on. I just need to decide which one to focus on. That might require the toss of a coin!

Also published on Medium.