I Wrote a Book ... What? ...
It has been awhile since I've written anything here ... actually over 2 months! I apologize to my subscribers for the lack of content.
I have been writing, a lot ... just not here. Many of you know I spent most of this summer writing a book. Crazy! And during that time, I even went to Hawaii to surf, twice! That's even crazier! Since the book's release, I set up Torii Publishing (if you open the book cover, you'll see that Torii Publishing published my book so I thought I better create a web presence for it). Then I went on to become an Astronaut ... just kidding!
I laugh now, but I wasn't always laughing. Write a book: sounded so easy. I'm a lawyer; I write all the time. I had something to say and even knew what I wanted to say. Yet, there were times when I sat at my desk crying,
thinking that I couldn't do it. I worried that no one would find value in what I wrote. I had a short deadline and I was afraid that what I produced would not be good enough to publish.
When the first print book showed up in the mail, I was thrilled. I suppose it's like having a baby - once the baby is here, you forget the pain that happened just before. But getting to that final product was filled with missteps, pitfalls, uncertainty. After I finished writing and editing, I started worrying about every step to get the book published. Even that was hard! And I had to learn all the steps as I went, hoping I didn't make any serious errors. And I did make mistakes and I would do some things differently if I had to do it over.
But I survived and here I am ... a published author. Sounds even funny to say it. And now that the book is done, I ask, "Now what?" And that question isn't easy to answer. There are so many avenues I can go down. It's scary again.
I suppose that anytime you do anything out of the ordinary, it's going to be scary. I remember the first time I started sliding down the ski slope, it was scary. When I called my biological father that Thanksgiving Night, I was scared. When I went to Japan to meet him, I was scared. When I was in the middle of my first standup paddle race, I was scared. I remember the first time my board actually dropped off the lip of wave, it was scary - actually that's still scary! So I guess being scared isn't really a bad thing. Maybe by doing enough things in life that scare you, you learn that feeling scared is okay and learn not to let that feeling stop you from doing what you want to do.
TODAY'S HOW TO
I'm starting to think that when I want to do something, fear can't stop me. For every wave I've dropped successfully, I have failed plenty and been pounded by the wave. But I want to keep dropping more waves. So I suppose writing the book was just another wave. And what happens now that the book is written ... that wave is racing across the ocean to reach me and I just need to get ready to drop it when it arrives.
