I'll book some time to write this

I just cued up Jaytech Music Podcast Feb '08. For the ridiculously astute or bored, it opens with the same tune I play in my epic running YouTube. I'll have to get the name of the track one day. As it's one of the few sets I've bothered to download onto my work computer, it gets a lot of action. But why am I ambling around with text such as this? When I can start a much sexier paragraph.

Last week, I effectively raised $3,000+ to publish my book. That's right folks. After botched starts, and some missed deadlines, the book is getting published in 2012.

While I'm a bit lean on entries this year, it's been fun tracing back the journey. I hit the ground with an objective in returning to Sydney, and had booked a trip to the Emerging Writer's Festival the second weekend I was back. The experience was invaluable. Meeting like-minded people, hearing the same sorts of questions, and getting a sense of what others were doing and how it applied to me.

If you're one of the six people reading this and thinking of going - I urge you to next time it rolls out. It can be expensive to get there if you're not based in Melbourne, but in my opinion it was worth every cent.

You could chart the journey a bit further. I commented on the rise-and-rise of crowdfunding and how my book will get published. Pointing to the sites Pozible and Blurb, I pointed out that in combining the two I could cut out publishers altogether and do my own thing. I think it's around here that I mentioned something about putting what I know into practice, and decided to run with it.

But there were distractions. One day, I'd love to be doing my own thing and making an impact on my own terms. I expressed as much to a friend-of-a-friend who runs her own business. It was the wake-up call I needed, what the hell have I been doing with my book for all this time? It was time to apply the blowtorch.

And apply the blowtorch I did. Not everything came off. I had some ambitious ideas that may never see the light of day. One of my favourites was taking over the banner space of Inthemix Lifestyle forum with a banner and a call-to-action to buy my book. I smirk as I type and appreciate the irony.

But a lot of things did, and more importantly, people like yourself came through. I mean you, the reader. I put myself out there and started broadcasting my potential story to the world, and a lot of people placed faith in me and financed it.

I can only hope you enjoy the tale as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Even that time I was coming back from a train in Kiama and had written 3,000 words and at the exact time the battery decided to fuck out as I typed "n(o)" to the Microsoft Word save prompt. Yes, even then.

I deliberately used the term "broadcast" when talking about my potential story though, it's what drives me. The more I talk about dealing with the issues I've faced the more it can normalise it for others. I've got a very deliberate strategy in my approach and it's starting to come to fruition.

I spoke to an old boss about the potential implications of broadcasting this story. There's foreseeable outcomes and ones that will be harder to predict. I don't claim to have all the answers when it comes to running with this, but whatever's driving me shows no signs of stopping, slowing, or anything but accelerating.

You don't go to crazy and back without returning with some crazy ideas of your own.
Let's see where we end up?