Author Journey | Journal Entry 01
I have been waking up with a song in my heart, stories in my mind and words on my lips. This morning it was the word fastidious. Other days it's eloquent or precision, mercurial or whimsy, touché or facetious.
Unlike Hard Metal, which gave me headaches and genius ideas in equal measure and left me excessively mentally fatigued upon completion of their guide, Soft Metal energy is quite different. I've been what I call multi-dimensional tasking. Busy doing all the things and living out lives, but in other dimensions too. No wonder Soft Metal has so many fascinating stories to tell!
And the creativity! I posted my first ever reel to my personal Instagram grid, something I never thought I would do. I don't do anything on camera and honestly I didn't know how. Thank goodness for Canva Pro and the in-app music library, where I found some favorite Sarah Brightman songs, the soundtrack of my life.
I signed up to start my podcast for The 8 Elements™. I wrote and recorded the intro and outro in the middle of the night, when my environment was quiet enough for a clean recording. There's just so much to say, and it won't fit in the series of books. So, a podcast is another medium, besides blogging, I can use to share all the things on my heart and mind that come up to be explored and added to this body of work.
And the storytelling. A very private person, I suddenly felt inspired to share how The 8 Elements™ affects me, my life and business as I write about their unique personal energy. I follow other authors, mostly fiction writers, who share their book writing process. So, I polled my IG followers to see if they'd be interested in following my author's journey. A new series of blogs, podcast episodes and IG stories was born. Now I just have to teach myself how to create IG stories without going live, face to camera.
And the 7s! I recently learned that readers waited seven years for beloved author and Mother Earth element, Diana Gabaldon to write and publish her latest book in the epic time traveling historical fiction romance series, Outlander. And that the newly released book, Bittersweet, which was to be a one year project, took best selling author and Water element, Susan Cain a full seven years to research, labor over and write. And when I downloaded the author read audiobook I noticed that it was seven hours long. Seven years to write a book that will take me a week of hour long evening walks to consume.
And the compartments. Hard Metal has very structured mental compartments like parked cars in designated spaces in the multi-leveled garage of their minds, but Soft Metal's compartments are like boxes within boxes. The layers that get revealed as you're opening each one not only tells a story that enriches your experience of the unboxing but increases the value of the treasure hidden inside the smallest box.
The Soft Metal annual guide is longer by twenty pages than the Hard Metal one. The nuggets of gold I prospected were just too good not to include. The stories were just so fascinating, the quotes so wonderfully superb and the references to other works, especially on joy and dopamine just so compelling.
The Soft Metal guide has also been a hard one to finish. The writing is not as excellent as I'd like it to be. It's not perfect or even great. But I can't wait until I am a better writer to publish it. I feel like the refining process could go on indefinitely. People are waiting and this one is holding me up from moving on to the Earth element guides. So, I'll just have to offer the annual guide to the Soft Metal elements as is and hope they'll forgive my multitude of shortcomings.
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