Greetings backers!

TL:DR: Revision is in progress. I'm going to focus down in October and get this revision pass done. I've given you a sample from the chapter about Dreams. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25.

I wanted to check in with all of you after my big trip to let you know where things are with this project. I rarely get any work done during the Writing Excuses workshops because I am too occupied with staff duties and care work. That was not the case this time, which makes me very happy. I worked on the book consistently through the whole trip.

One of my revision tasks was to take the giant chapter where I covered Dreams, Goals, and Priorities and turn it into separate chapters for each of those concepts. This required pulling apart ideas, deciding which ideas go where, building a new "spine" of thought for each chapter and then reassembling everything so it makes sense. The result is going to be far more comprehensible and useful for all of you backers to read, but it has been a lot of slow, thinky work.

Writing it out like that, helps me see why the process for these early chapters is taking so much longer than I wanted it to. I feel the clock ticking in my head and there is a near constant stream of thought about how I should be working faster. Yet it isn't the existence of other things in my life that is preventing me from working as fast as I want to, it is the fact that I have to walk away from the work and let the thoughts percolate before I can see how to fix them. So I push words around, then I let them sit, then I push them around, then I do something else, then I come back and have an aha moment. Slowly I get to a place where I'm confident that the words say what I need them to. 

Fortunately most of the chapters won't need this level of deconstruction and reconstruction. I'm very hopeful that I'll be able to fly through revision on later chapters. In fact I'm starting to work ahead on easier chapters while the more complicated chapters are percolating. 

The other thing I am doing is paying attention to activities which might use up the percolation space in my brain. I skipped sending out my monthly Newsletter in September, I've let my blog and Patreon sit in idle mode for now. I'm posting on social media less. All of which is the result of giving this project first crack at my available writing energy. 

A thing that is giving me hope relating to this project is the conversations I've had with people during consultations, group mentoring, or even at the in-person retreat I attended. Each of these conversations is a treasure. I keep wanting to shove chapters into the hands of people who those chapters might help. So the urgency I feel to get this project done isn't just guilt around not meeting the (ambitious) deadlines I said I would hit, it is that this book can't begin to be helpful until it exists. It can't exist until I do the work.

So that is what October is about for me. I'm not going on any trips and my other projects are mostly in resting phases. I get to spend October finishing the revision on Structuring Life to Support Creativity and I'm going to schedule my time around that as the central project. I'm also going to make time to record some of the presentations that I've promised.

Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25.  Down below I'm including a backers-only snippet from the beginning of the chapter on Dreams. 
Hope you enjoy!
Sandra Tayler