Becoming an Author

In January of last year, I wrote a book.

I had toyed with the idea before the event. We gathered in a mansion in Austin for a hackathon about Our Emerging Future, and I joked with my friend, “Maybe I’ll come out of this with a book!”

It didn’t take any more structure or intention than that. Talking with all those brilliant individuals truly devoted to human wellbeing, the text of my book poured out of me over the course of three days.

Yes, I wrote my book in three days. I was polishing it on the flight home.

At home, I was surrounded by friends and community as the book kept birthing through me. I assembled artworks I’d drawn on my tablet over the last 3 years, printed everything, and scrapped together a hard copy.

I refined from there and three weeks later, I had a book proof from Amazon good enough to sell, and I released the text. It’s titled The Way of Devotion, and somehow I am the only one on Amazon with this book title. I find it eerily mystical.

Later last year, we took the book off the market and published a second edition, but this whole experience has taken the pressure off what I thought a book had to be and what it would take to create such a thing.

It’s fortunate, because now the internet is just a graveyard of corpses reanimating, the beginning of a technological zombie apocalypse. One of my favorite content creators posted about AI deepfakes of her content proliferating on the internet and it made me sick like any story of gang-rape would. I wanna get out of here.

I have removed all the [social] media apps from my phone. I have opened my home to real human beings, and with people around all the time, it’s hard to even get to a computer. We bought a digital camera because we don’t want our phones around.

I spend my precious alone time on my ReMarkable tablets writing or reading long books or watching tv shows I’ve seen a thousand times. I’ve bookmarked the substack dashboard so I can bypass the temptation to scroll.

I don’t think I’m alone in wanting a more analog life. Certainly those in my home are choosing it with me.

I plan to publish more books, and all the pressure is off, because books are allowed to be anything. Now that I’ve written my first, I know that I don’t have to do it like everyone else does it. My first book says everything I think is vitally important for me to say, and that means all my subsequent books are low-stakes, fun, creative projects, they could be even smaller than this first one, which is only 75 pages.

I’ve been quiet about my book. Something about publishing a printed text feels more real than all the thousands of words I have posted online. It’s vulnerable to have something out there for real. But the book is there, it’s available, it’s potent, it’s dense, it has the power to change the way you experience your life forever.

I’ve been honored to see it on altars, book shelves, and coffee tables, to sign it at parties, to read it aloud. I am proud of what I’ve created and excited for what’s next, and if you don’t see me on the internet all that much, it’s because I’m busy doing something that feels more human.

Being a subscriber here is your best chance to hear from me and hear about the upcoming books. Best of all, these writings get delivered to you via email without any need to interface with media sites.

I might be writing like six books at a time, but I’ve been in this game long enough to know they’ll all make it to the finish line eventually.

I’m loving you!