ABDN Book Diary 01

Begin at something resembling the beginning

After announcing that I making a book out of this newsletter, I had the idea to share the process with my paid subscribers. Welcome to my book design diary.

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Saturday, May 10

When I start personal projects like this book, I sometimes struggle to begin at the beginning. I am not a particularly disciplined person, and I don’t have a lot of “free time” these days, so I tend to focus on the parts of a project I am most excited about in order to actually get it off the ground. Sometimes, they stay floating in limbo and never come back down. I hope writing about this one will prevent that.

For this particular project, that means that I have spent ample time brainstorming the title, writing the cover design brief, and playing with paragraph styles before I’ve even decided what will be in the book—let alone edit it!

I’ve had an idea about what I want to include in the book, but this list was definitely incomplete and only lived in my head. So, yesterday, in an attempt to begin at something resembling the beginning, I sat down and made a list of the writing I want to include.

Here’s what it looks like so far: