After three years of writing and editing, my monster of a book Insider’s Guide to Parenting: How to Solve Messy Problems and Build a Great Family is coming out April 2019. Here is a bit o’ history…
In 2014 I wanted an easy way to access all of the strategies, tactics, suggestions and experiences I’d collected as a therapist, but as many of you know, I hate paper so a manilla folder crammed with handwritten notes was not happening. Google Docs is great but easily becomes a rats nest of digital notes. The solution was to organize my nearly two decades of ideas into a searchable document.
Within a few weeks of this consolidation, I found I was referring to it nearly every day. I also found I would send chunks of it to parents or their college kids to read. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend an hour or two cleaning up a ‘how to’ section for finding an addiction treatment center to send to a parent, pulling together a list of books and earmarking pages to read to a college student, or texting a colleague a list of DBT skills and my thoughts on modifications.
This was crazy making at it’s best.
Out of a need for efficiency, I created several ‘cheat sheets’ for parents and colleagues which I eventually posted on my blog.
For any of you that have been reading the blog, I started many of the posts with ‘Insider’s Guide‘ since I truly believed this is what us professionals would be talking about and recommending behind the scenes when clients aren’t around (I’m foreshadowing here!). As the blog grew and requests came in for other information, I realized well after everyone else had…oh, this is a book!
Well, shucky-ducky – I’ve never written a book and didn’t consider myself a writer, let alone an author. Those are isolated misanthropes on rocky coastlines in Maine suffering for their craft. I’m a therapist, can’t spell at all, and can barely tie my shoes without help (why aren’t there more velcro shoes for adults?). And as months turned to years I stuffed all I knew (not much) and all I’d forgotten (much more) and all I could get updated research on into what evolved into something that actually looked like….(gulp)… a book. Well, the content of a book.
But writing the content was the easy part.
In future posts, I’ll get into how the massive Google Doc was pruned and shaped into recognizable form that could be put to paper. How the heck does someone actually get a book published? How do you design a cover, format the interior and get everything so lined-up and perfect? I didn’t know but found out.