This 10-part series captures my reflections on publishing my memoir How I Lost My Eyebrows and Found Myself. It’s a mix of visual essays and text-based reflections. Scroll to the end for link to Amazon.
When I tell the story of how I self-published my book, it may give a false impression that I knew exactly how it will pan out. It would seem like a straight path. But if I told you about all the dead ends and rabbit holes that I went down, the journey would sound more like a labyrinth.
It wasn’t just any labyrinth. It was a labyrinth wired with a time bomb called “burnout”. If I got hit, I would risk putting off the project, and eventually shelfing it.
This post is about how I got out of this dangerous labyrinth, and game enough to go in a second time. Here’s how I managed to survive.
I knew that the explosion can be delayed if I finished a complete draft that allows me to keep moving forward. Every short, 1-2 weeks sprint is a way of pushing that final moment back. Knowing this bomb’s peculiarity, I had to timebound the work into sprints lasting a maximum of 2 weeks. Anything longer, I would risk losing momentum.
For example, when I started writing, I only wrote 10 short essays that were mere musings. I finished them in 3 days and then sent them out for feedback. The time to explosion got pushed back and I got to breathe a little while waiting.
After the feedback came, I got cracking with significant changes in the flow of each essay so that the takeaway was clearer. I wrote 10 more essays, and created a distinct arc that pulled together all of them. This took me about 2-3 weeks before I sent it off again for another round of feedback. I got another extension. But the bomb is still ticking.
Progress isn’t only about doing and completing tasks. Writing is a creative process, and there is sometimes the need to pause for the ideas to simmer. Yet, the ticking timebomb serves as a reminder that such periods of gestation needs a clear start and end, or I would risk losing momentum.
You may protest: “I can’t finish writing in just 2 weeks!” (or whatever time you may think you need). In the face of an imminent threat, I set the size of the box first, then force the work to fit inside, rather than estimate how big a box I need depending on the work. This is so I can be sure of escaping before the explosion.
My Phd advisor, Dr Z always said “a good dissertation is a done dissertation”. No matter how amazing your idea is, as long as it’s not complete, it’s nothing. It is a reminder that survival is about many iterations of completion, not perfection. I carried that advice in me all the time, and it has gotten me out of many labyrinths wired with bombs.
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