A blog is your whiskey distillery

Writing a book is more like distilling whiskey than microwaving a plate of pizza rolls.

So while I love things like the National Novel Writing Month, a contest that pushes writers to complete a 50,000-word manuscript by the end of the month, I think a one or two-year window is a little more realistic. Or when I hear stories of a writer like Stephen King going on one epic binge-write, knocking out a book in three days, it's the same thing - I wish I could make that happen, but I don't think I ever will.

Instead, I want to paint a different picture about the writing process from my own experience. It's an alternative that may take some more time, but it's an easier starting point and a far more reasonable pace.

It just kinda happened

In 12 weeks, I'll be publishing my next book called Here or There. When I started this project over four years ago, I didn't realize I had started a new book project at all. I was just writing a blog post about how to avoid playing on the work league softball team. Few weeks later, there was one about why I always cheered for Wile E. Coyote. And another on how to handle the "Escalator Dictator" at the North and Clybourn stop.

The material for a book slowly built over time. Which is why my advice on writing a book would be to first start with a blog. One post a week. Doesn't matter which day it goes up, but probably try and keep it as the same day for a routine.

The blog becomes your whiskey distillery. Each post serves as the raw material. I published a little over 200 posts in the last four years on ChicagoNow. Of that, there were 30-35 posts that worked well together as a book and that became the Here or There whiskey barrel. This was stored next to a few other barrels on the shelves. I've put more background on those other oens toward the end of the article, but I don't want to derail this post with too much backstory. I want to make sure you get the most important piece of advice about starting/running a blog. One that took me 4+ years to grasp.

Don't pay attention to the stats

The temptation with starting a blog is that it's a tool to "build your brand" "build an audience" "go viral." And Google Analytics makes it really easy to see just how many visitors and pageviews your posts are getting.

But this analytics pursuit is, at best, a distraction and at worst it turns you into a crotchety old sailor drinking an entire barrel of whiskey. I remember seeing some of my posts that I thought were really good end up receiving 50 views. And of course on that same day there will always be someone in the LinkedIn newsfeed humblebragging about their most recent 250,000 view post. Or when I post a link on Facebook, it gets like seven charitable Likes followed by someone else with a new baby picture clocking in at 685.

Not going viral, not having thousands of daily views (or hundreds) took its toll on me. I'm guessing it does on a lot of writers. But what changed things for me were two things, first was this moment, but second was when I realized just how many posts didn't make the eventual cut for Here or There. The selecting process for the book made me think, "Wow, it's probably a good thing I didn't have a bigger audience. There was a lot of junk in there."

The junk is part of the process, just like not everything makes it into the final bottle of whiskey. I think the only things that matter for your whiskey distillery is doing a weekly post, putting in the time, and building a bunch of material. If you write fiction or poetry and feel like a blog is more for essays or commentary on current events, my challenge to that would be why not just do your own thing? No one will email you and say, "Hey now, this isn't a blog." And if somebody does that, you probably don't want them as a subscriber anyways.

The best part about running a weekly blog is it starts to rewire your brain in two ways. One you become an idea factory. You don't dwell over one individual post, fine-tuning it for months. You move on. If there's a grammar mistake, eh, so be it. On to the next one. Next day on the train to work, something catches your eye. "Oh, that would be a good post." Jot it down. Start again.

The second way things change is that this practice slowly chips away at the fear of publishing. One of the eventual challenges of publishing or self-publishing a book is the vulnerability of having your work out there for people to read. It feels a whole lot safer as a Word doc on my computer. But the blog gives you practice in this exercise, making the eventual book easier to ship.

In terms of visitors to the blog, all that matters are the subscribers. The people that have been with my blog for the last two, three, four years, those people mean the world to me. I'm trying to turn my focus away from, "How do I land more visitors" to "How do I write more stuff for the people already there."

Next week I'll get into more of the editing process. What happens when you have started a blog, have 20 posts you want to turn into a book, or have put together a full manuscript. What do you do from there? What's next?

Hey, let's talk about it next Tuesday.

I started this part in third person, "Chris O'Brien is the" but felt way too weird. So hey, thanks for reading. Hope this was helpful. I am the Founder of Long Overdue LLC. Long Overdue helps retired people who have always wanted to write a book with the writing/editing/publishing process. Also helps people who want to record their stories (or parent/grandparent's stories) in book or audio format but would prefer someone else do the recording. If you have a project that you need help on, connect/message me on LinkedIn. Happy to assist!

The Other Barrels

Toilet Bowl

I had been working on this novel since 2009. The story is about Brad and Mark Godfrey, who are the great-grandsons of the guy who invented the urinal cake. These two, plus their best friend Tim, are trying to save the family business with a new invention; a smart toilet that would allow people to track their health from their home bathroom.

Now when I say "working on," what that means is a few sprints followed by months and months of inactivity. That's why those "write a novel in a month" contests can work, someone may put in the same amount of time in 30 days as they would in 30 years.

But in April of 2015, I hit a patch of writer's block. My idea to snap out of the funk was to just open my refrigerator and write a post about anything I saw on the shelves. This ended up taking on a life of it's own, it became a seven or eight part series about how ideas come to life and the forces that try to take them down. It was kind of like Inside Out with one character representing Fear and one that I called "The Middle School Monster" who thinks everything is not cool.

What did I do with this post? The Middle School Monster ended up being re-purposed as a "Worry Troll" for the character Tim in Toilet Bowl. Tim wasn't even the main character at that point, and that was six years into writing the novel! A new story line was emerging. Toilet Bowl would be a book about Tim Bartleby and his internal worries and insecurities. The main conflict: Tim is marrying Brad's high school sweetheart, but as Brad is getting more and more successful, more profitable with this new product, Tim is afraid that if Emma loved him before, how can he be sure she won't love him again?

All of that emerged from just opening the fridge and trying to write a blog post. I'm glad that I didn't rush through the project in 2012 or 2013 because I would have missed out on the idea that became the heart and soul of the story.

Too Old for the Buzz Cut

This is about as close as I'll get to the Stephen King binge-write. I was in Austin, Texas for my cousin's wedding and one morning I was up writing a post about how hard it is to get a buzz cut in your mid-twenties. Ended up being 5,000 words long, which is too long for a blog post but too short for a book.

This led to the idea Fast Food Bookstore. A place where people can publish ebooks that are in between 10 - 100 pages long.

Medium Rare Basketball and Healthcare

The most viewed posts on Medium Rare were ones I did about March Madness or the NBA Playoffs. I decided to just spin this off as it's own website, MediumRareBasketball.com.

I'm starting this process again with a series called Medium Rare Healthcare. Just like Here or There, I didn't set out to do either of these projects, the idea just built over time.

Tackle the Library

This wasn't from my blog, but I have a friend who reads a book every week and writes a blog post on it. I've watched him improve as a writer the last two or three years from all of this output. He ended up starting a series called "Tackle the Library" where he takes topics like The French Revolution or Plato and writes a 50-75 page book on it.

These works are part of the Fast Food Bookstore idea.