Tales from a Bruised Mind

I am sitting in my lounge room with a stack of paper in front of me as thick as an encyclopaedia. I am well and truly in over my head.

I thought that writing a book would be pretty easy. I was very wrong.

Writing a book, no matter what it’s about, is a huge process. There is the planning, then the writing – which could take up to a year or longer – then there is the editing, which again could take months and months. Then comes the book design and the marketing and, of course, the selling, if that’s what you choose to do.

I’m currently at what I’d like to call phase three: editing. One of the hardest bits of the publishing puzzle.

How do I know this?

Well, my first book, A Ballad from a Bruised Brain (ABFABB) was such an endeavour it almost broke me – mentally and physically.

Here’s why.

Writing and editing a book from start to finish is not as easy as you might think

I learnt all of this the hard way when I set out to write my first book. Sure, I had a good idea and what I thought was an awesome story to tell, but that’s just one part of the entire picture.

When it comes to actually editing, you’re essentially tasked with re-reading and re-writing a good portion of your original work. That takes a lot of time, and a whole lot of effort, commitment and patience.

The process of my first book, ABFABB, led me to deeply understand, re-read and edit every single word, phrase and paragraph for clarity and consistency. I had a first draft copy published by printer and distributor Blurb, and then went about scribbling in the book manually all the changes I wanted to be made.

Then, I worked from page one right through to the very last page and inputted the changes straight into the online working document.

It was painfully and annoyingly slow, but that’s all that I knew at the time.

This time round, I’m doing things differently

For my second book, I’m going to do some things the same, and other ways very differently.

Firstly, I’m going to invest a bit of my money into hiring a proper editor to do some of the hard work for me. Not only will this save time, but it’ll be a good opportunity for a fresh set of eyes to look over and proof my hard work and many, many thousands of words.

But before I get to handing my piece of work over, I’m going to do the hard yards and commit to editing a first draft myself. That means that the product I give to the editor will be the best possible piece of work I can create.

What’s the process from here?

Editing, editing and maybe even some more editing.

I’ll yet again “accept” the changes made on my physical printed version and will then manually input them into my computer.

Then, as I’ve already said, my work will go off to the external editor and I’ll patiently wait to see what will come out of it. Will it be any good? Who knows! But I’ve got to give it a go and try. Take a bit of a risk and see what comes of it. There is really no harm in that!

My second book will be available by the end of Q1, 2025

Writing, editing, publishing and selling books takes a lot of time. It also takes a lot of time because I have to fit it into my crazy work schedule.

But here I am setting a goal of self-publishing my second book, Quadrants of my Mind, by the end of the first quarter of next year – 2025.

That’s around March, which might seem far away but it really, truly isn’t. Life flies by these days (I am sounding old and I’m only 26!)

By that time, I’ll have two pieces of very personal, compelling and honest work out there in the world that I am very, very proud of. It’ll all be worth it in the end!

I can see it now, two great books (I hope) on my book shelf.

You might think I’m a bit strange for writing like this, but I have to motivate myself to commit to getting this new book over the line.

I want to make it happen, so I’ll dig my heels in and get to work.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about this new book right here on this blog, as well as on my social media accounts and my brain Instagram, bi_polar_bear1

Best,

Zak