I shipped off the publisher draft of Startup Boards last night. For those of you who haven’t written a book that means I’m in the home stretch “pre-production” – I’ll have the final draft done by 9/3 and it’ll be published by December.
This has been – by far – the hardest book I’ve written so far. If you like my writing and want to do me a solid, pre-order a copy of Startup Boards today. That’ll make me smile.
The book was originally planned to come out this summer. My co-author Mahendra Ramsinghani wrote a good first draft. We got together in Miami for a week in February to work on it together. I was pressing for an end of February deadline for the publisher draft. While we made progress that week, I knew I was struggling. And not just with the book – I was depressed but I hadn’t yet acknowledged it.
By the end of February I just didn’t care about the book. I didn’t want to work on it anymore. And I knew I was depressed and just struggling to get my normal work done. So I told Wiley (my publisher) that I was punting until the fall. We reset the schedule with the goal of having the book out by the end of the year.
Mahendra was patient with me. I didn’t pick the book back up until a month ago. I’ve been working on it since the beginning of August and I made a hard push over the weekend to get it out to the door.
Saturday was a grind. I finally hopped on my bike at the end of the day and rode out to our new house in Longmont and then wandered over to my partner Seth’s house (a mile away) for a party he was having. On Sunday morning I knew it was in good shape. I spent all day Sunday in front of my computer except for lunch with Amy. I gave myself until 5pm, at which point I was going for a run. I had a superb, book fueled 75 minute run, had some dinner, spent one more hour on what I was now referring to as “the fucking book” and then sent it off via email to Wiley.
Man – this one has been hard. I hope it’s helpful.