This week I’ve dialed up the pressure by adding the pre-sales of my book to my website. It’s a bold move for someone who has only written 40,000 words of the required 65,000 but I have written those in 70 days so if my calculations are correct, I should be hitting my goal in 30 days time. It feels a little like building a really elaborate lego kit. The 7000+ pieces feel overwhelming to begin with but if I follow the instructions I should technically end up with the finished millennium falcon. Not that I've ever done that particular lego set but Matt had been hinting for years that he’d like to.

‍

Writing 1000 words a night has been a mixed bag of emotions. If I know what I’m going to write, an hour will fly by and I’ll have my precious 1000 words at the end. If I’m unsure then it is excruciating. Each word is so hard to type and my typing is terrible. After parent teacher interviews this week, Frank got sent home with an online typing course to help improve his accuracy. I should be doing it. Despite doing stacks of typing I’m still a really fast-slow typist who looks at the keys more than the screen. I deeply regret not taking my typing class at high school seriously. My accuracy is also terrible with most of this paragraph underlined in red or blue when it first appears.

‍

I’m not letting my slow typing deter me. Now that I’ve asked for money from people to buy the finished book I have a legal obligation to produce the goods which is a great incentive. It's kind of exciting having this pressure to get the book done, my 100 videos in 100 days project has been a great motivator because it's easier to make a video about writing a book if I’ve actually been writing a book. I do feel like I’m talking about it all the time so forgive me if I sound repetitive. I feel repetitive. Same hustle everyday - 1000 words and a video, it's an unfair ask of anyone on top of two jobs and two kids. It's certainly not sustainable but it also won’t last forever. In thirty days I’ll be finished with my videos and should be close to the first shitty draft of my book. All I have to do is keep showing up.

‍

I enjoy the videos less than the writing unsurprisingly. I was hoping they would grow on me and I’d turn into a confident video blogger but doing one every day is tough, especially because most of them are squeezed in before the chaos of dinner. The pay off hasn't been huge either. I’ve maybe got another few dozen followers on each platform but nothing worth writing home about - although that is exactly what I’m doing right now. There are probably people who already knew me who are vaguely more interested but the ground swell had been subtle. This is of course completely understandable and fits with my understanding of the world that everyone is busy enough with their own lives to be too fussed about mine. I don’t have a single second to do anything else at the moment so I can completely empathise with not being able to do everything I wish I could. 

‍

I’ve very much enjoyed reaching out to old friends as I read through the years of my diaries that they feature. Old colleagues and friends who I’ve been lucky to reconnect with. It also sparked lots of conversation with Mum about events that I didn’t write about as well as she remembers. Matt and I have had lots of conversations about how things happened. My perspective is often completely different from his. We approached the same situation from such different vantage points - him as the crazy genius inventor with a vision and me as the struggling designer Mum who was in charge of the family budget. There are parts of this book that I haven’t talked to Matt about because I’m not sure what he’ll think. I’m writing from the heart which often side steps the polite etiquette that someone might have when speaking about their husband and one true love. 

‍

I’ve just hit 2019 which was when work started to get really stressful. We were edging closer to our final design for the panels but it was costing us everything. Money, time and energy and we still had so far to go. Luckily it was around this time that I started to hoover up self help books and biographies about entrepreneurs. The worse the story, the better. Podcasts like How I built this with Guy Raz were hugely inspirational. They reframed some of our struggles as being necessary to the success we wanted. Strangely Matt benefited from this more than me because with every new catastrophe, I became less panicky and more calm, appreciating that perhaps this was the only way forward. Matt was so focused on the outcome that very little would’ve convinced him otherwise but I need to work on my resilience and perseverance. 

‍

I did and that perseverance has led me to this moment right now. 40,000 words deep into a book about how things didn’t go to plan. Not all of it has been joyful to remember. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. Writing will always be my therapy and this book is no different. As it starts to take shape I’m really excited to see what its final form will be. If you’re curious  then please buy a copy. I’m not going to keep banging on about it but I will add a section to the end of my blogs as a gentle reminder. This could be the last book I ever write but it could also be the first, who knows. I’m looking forward to finding out.

‍