What was I thinking?
I’ve been a little quiet of late as the COVID-19 thing has messed with more or less every aspect of my day to day. Luckily, no one in my family has been infect (knock on wood), but my eldest daughter was in the UK at the University of Bristol for a semester abroad—and we had to get her back before the US went into lockdown (and we did). Then my globe-trotting mother was on a (get this) cruise ship that:
1. Couldn’t dock in Peru (ports closed)
2. Couldn’t dock in Chile (ports closed)
3. Couldn’t dock in Columbia (ports closed)
4. Had to wait to go through the Panama Canal
5. Finally got to Miami, and was able to disembark and fly to Madison, then I drove her to her home in Waukesha.
All this is to explain the silence—but there’s another big thing I’ve been doing that I’ve kept more or less under the radar. Why? ‘Cause I wanted to make sure I was actually going to do it before trumpeting it.
What is it? Writing a new book. Online and in real time. Via 301 consecutive daily livestreams.
Yup, I am, in a livestream series I call “BOOKWARD BOUND—301 days from ‘I should really do this’ to DONE.”
During each daily livestream, I do something (anything) to advance the book toward its goal: the posting of press-ready files to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing on January 1, 2021.
Some days, I’m writing. Others, I’m outlining and mind mapping. And still others, I’m complaining about how flippin’ hard it is to stay focused enough to write a dang book.
I haven’t gone loud about this because I wasn’t 100% certain that I would be able to fulfill my promise to livestream EVERY SINGLE DAY. But so far, I have. Last night’s episode was #32. That’s right, a solid month+ of BOOKWARD BOUND in the books.
What’s the title of the book?
“NONFICTION BRAND—Discovering, crafting and communicating the ‘completely true / completely you’ brand you already are.”
BOOKWARD BOUND is an ‘as it happens’ livestream documentary of my journey, complete with “I’m not feeling it today, but…” and “Ooooh, I just got a cool idea!” as it happened realness.
If you’re at all interested in how one dude works to actually get a book done and out into the world, check it out on my YouTube channel.
One caveat: this series is, in fact, shot LIVE, so there will all kinds of hiccups, miscued graphics and the occasional video/audio problems you can expect from today’s COVID-19 challenged Internet. And the fact that I’m sometimes going live with my co-author Kirkland (as in Costco’s private label brand of blended Irish Whiskey)? Well, that just to keep things…interesting. – dp
