Can you relate to wanting to write a book and enjoying the splendor (& sometimes struggling in the splendor) of stringing words together? I would love to hear about it!
I wrote poetry in elementary school. I had my art with rainbows as a theme on every piece covering my bedroom wall like wallpaper in sixth grade. I wrote and illustrated my first two handmade “books” in junior high (one about friendship and the other about just being me.) Through some miracle, my high school typewriting class teacher let me type creative stories every time he gave the class timed typing tests. And I mustn’t forget to add my locked “Dear Diary” from these early years.
Fast forward, when I first dreamed up my first gift/self-help book “all I did was listen,” I set aside a weekend by myself, devoted to writing and illustrating it. The first evening of the very first weekend, I froze and went out on my own to the movie premiere of “Sex and the City.” I got writing the next morning. Thanks Carrie Bradshaw. A momentum eventually began and quarterly weekend of writing turned into waking daily at four A.M. to write (my soul went before me and I felt compelled to follow.)
Now I am soon to release my fourth book The Relationship Book: A Soulful, Transformational, and Artistic Inventory of Your Connective Life and the ideas for future writing keep coming. I am profoundly grateful to be working with the team at Wise Ink, co-founded by Amy Cutler Quale and Dara Moore Beevas. The book-making process gigantic work is REAL, and to have professional help with the editing, design, marketing, and printing, is BIG RELIEF. I sing their praises with tangerine-scented butterflies and glittering daisies rising into the air.
If you are considering writing and/or illustrating a book, I offer you this:
—Comparisons are contaminants. There is only one of you. Words come through you like a distinct fingerprint. —Maybe reading this now is your holy invitation to write and/or to illustrate. —Start small, or smaller than small. Tiny words. One words. A polka dot. —Treat yourself to finding a pleasurable pen or a courageous crayon (perhaps Cornflower or Mahogany?) and to a treasured tiny notebook. —Jot down thoughts, dreams and/or doodles as they come to you in your week. Touch them with compassion. Sing to them. Rock them. Love them. Put them under your pillow and plant them like seeds.
Then watch YOU grow
& I will be here cheering you on.
With love to all the ages of you from all the ages of me, xoxo Rachel
