become a published author

Last nght we had a marvellous chance to hang out with and talk with some friends of my neighbour from The Farm, an amazing intentional community down in TN. Two of them are the primary publishers for our neighbour’s vegetarian / vegan cookbooks, and we had a good though brief talk about publishing. They suggested a couple of publishers they know whose area of interest seems to match what our book is about, so it’ll be nice to that. I may also see if they would be interested in my giving / sending them a copy of our introductory page and basic synopsis when it’s ready at breakfast today.

It’s exciting to be pretty much at the point of shopping things around a bit, though there’s definitely still some polishing and writing to do.

The first draft of our book is done. 129 pages, and LOTS of work to do between here and the next draft, but I look forward to taking it with me to North Carolina and pondering, editing, hacking, slashing, bemoaning, delighting, writing and rewriting over the next couple of weeks.

A note for non-43 things blogs: this isn’t really about ‘becoming a published author’, but that’s the ‘thing’ it’s attached to.

Aimée and I have volunteered to do the Newsletter for WindSong every other month, and this has been our first month putting it together. It’s taken a while to learn the software, and to get material from folks, but it has been a blast, and has provided a great opportunity to write up some little things here and there. Aimée’s wicked at the layout, and we’ve gotten a few good pictures and the like from members. I’m writing up two pieces for it, and it feels good to be working on such again.

My hope is that if this becomes a regular thing, it’ll provide yet another avenue for exploring some kinds of writing.

One of the small write-ups of mine is on the lunches and teas that I’ve initiated here. That’s been an extremely gratifying thing – both because I love them and find them such a good chance to get to know the other WindSongers who join us better, and also seeing how graetful some of the folks are for it, and how excited they are about us getting more low-organization, informal things happening.

We had a great session today, working on one of the chapters of our book: lots of new insights, several new pieces for me to write, and a lot of inspiration.

Now I need to give myself what I’ve been resisting… A writing schedule!

Time to chain myself to my word processor more regularly, and get my pieces done.

Having gotten excited, decided to check the details and send a basic pitch out tonight. We’ll see what we see.

So: As part of my work on Intentional Community I wrote up a report on my recent visit to an amazing Cohousing project, to deliver to the members of our group who weren’t able to make it. One of them pointed out that the “report” is in fact, an article, and gave some suggestions for where to pitch it. I’m going to contact them and pitch it tomorrow. Regardless of whether it flies or not, it’s exciting to realize that when I’m writing in depth about the things I’m passionate about, the end result is definitely worth while.

I will be thrilled if I get to “accidentally” write my first article and get it published.

Writing is a huge part of my life, even though at times I avoid it. I know that part of what I want to do with my life involves writing… writing Academic papers, Sci-Fi, magazine articles, Books… I’ve got plenty of ideas for all of the above, but need to get cracking!

• Select a paper, story, or article to work on until it’s finished
• Get it finished and begin shopping it around.
• Get it published.