I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write about some topic that’s on my mind.
Over the past couple days I’ve been doing a free write of the central chapter for my book. It’s central in location — it covers the fifth of nine principles of pursuing romance recklessly — and it provides a foundational philosophical idea, that to find love requires setting down fantasy and delusion and instead grappling with the real people and real situations the world presents to you. It is tentatively titled “Reality over Fantasy and Delusion,” but it could be “Objectivity over Ego,” or “Truth over Denial,” or something similar.
I was delighted to discover that my Things Men Gave Me essay An Aquamarine Ring from Tiffany provides an ideal memoir piece to serve as an example for the chapter. In that essay, I share how deluded I was in thinking that the ring Elijah bought for me was precursor to a proposal. I didn’t see Elijah for who he was or what he wanted and needed; I projected my own goals and ideas onto him. What is crazy to me is that I’ve been trying to write usefully about that, about getting a ring from Elijah, for almost a decade now. I knew that a story that made him into a villain, a narcissist, someone taking advantage of me was not a useful or true story to share. It was only in the last six months I found a way to make sense of what happened in a way that honored his reality and mine at the same time.
How could it possibly have taken me so long?
This morning in my philosophical Internet wanderings in which I wanted to learn more about Simon Critchley’s book on Greek tragedy having listened to a podcast making mention of it, I came across this essay The Virtue of Slow Writers by Laren Alwan. Aha! The universe providing me with some justification for my very slow creation of a book.
Alwan shares ideas from The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo1 (I’ve requested it from the library):
So—know when to let go, keep faith in the process, be flexible, fail better, and whenever possible, stay astonished. Though perhaps most importantly, recognize the value that comes with the passing of time itself. In The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity, essayist Louise DeSalvo writes, “We’ve internalized the idea that the only actions worth taking are those that can be accomplished quickly, […] that if our writing takes so long, we might not be cut out for the writing life.” The Art of Slow Writing is a manifesto for giving a book the time it needs, for cultivating patience and connection. DeSalvo describes, among other things, the challenge of “not knowing how long a book will take, and being comfortable with not knowing.”
Yes, I’ve been thinking that exactly — “I might not be cut out for the writing life.” At least the book writing life. I am a fast blogger but apparently a very very slow book author. The first book I wrote I finished quickly, in maybe six months, but it was a hack job, and I was working on a deadline established by the publishing company and the contract I had. After that book came out I promised myself my next book would be one I would feel I could stand behind, one that was written in my unique voice, and sharing ideas that were worth sharing.
That book was published in 2008 and here it is 2025 and I have not written and published another book. To be fair, I was busy. I was working full-time for most of that time and I was raising children and I went through a horrible, terrible divorce and then ten years of trying to reconstruct myself and my life. In my transition from married to divorced to dating to single to where I am now I lived in many places, bought and sold houses, ushered my children into adulthood. There was not time to write a book.
But now I have time — I have as much time as I want and need to write a book — unless I get cut down by death or dementia too soon.
I keep thinking I can get this book out by Valentine’s Day, when the new Wuthering Heights movie is set to release. And maybe I can, but I’m not sure whether I should instead just keep doing it at the pace that feels comfortable, studying all the philosophy I need as I go, writing memoir essays as examples (I will get back to that!), watching movies and reading books that provide fictional illustrative examples of reckful and reckless romance.
I plan to write multiple books in a “reckless guides” series. First I’m tackling romance, and then being reckless in relationship, and then maybe reckless abundance, on living affluently no matter how much money you have. This book won’t stand alone. Maybe it is better to just be an imperfectionist about it and get it done, stop trying to get all the philosophy right and not worry so much about writing in my own best voice?
I shared advice from indie book marketer Matt Holmes recently where he said:
- Your first book teaches you how to write and publish
- Your second book teaches you how to market
- Your third book is where things start clicking
- Your fourth book is where the compound effect begins
In a way the first book is sacrificial, Ray pointed out after reading the post in which I shared this advice. And it’s true. The first book need not be perfect; it needs to get published!
But it is also the foundation of my philosophy of recklessness, so it is probably worth taking my time on it.
- I was very sorry to read that DeSalvo passed away in 2018 at age 76 of cancer. She was a Virginia Woolf scholar, a memoir teacher and writer, and author of the memoir Vertigo, which I’d like to check out. ↩︎