Blue Planet Garden Blog

Garden Up! Progress Report

Three weeks to go until the manuscript for Garden Up! will be sent to the publisher.  Fingers crossed that we make the deadline! (Hehe, just kidding if anyone from Cool Springs Press is reading this.)

Although I’ve been blogging for two years, have written a few magazine articles and did quite a bit of promotional and business writing back in my marketing days, coauthoring a book has been a completely new experience.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far:


Writing a book is HARD

“Don’t worry, it’s just like stringing a bunch of blog posts together,” I breezily said to my coauthor Rebecca when she expressed some doubts about our ability to write an entire book in four months.  News flash: It’s nothing like stringing a few blog posts together!  I’ve discovered that I’m strongest at concepting, outlining and editing.  I can get hung up for hours sometimes just trying to write one paragraph.  Rebecca has more of a brain dump approach and just writes without worrying about perfection, so for the most part our skills complement each other.  Although we do argue a bit over Rebecca’s passionate belief that just about any sentence can be improved by adding an exclamation point.


It’s not a linear experience

I’m all about multi-tasking, but I hadn’t realized that the job of promoting a book begins well before the actual book is even written.  Helping to create promotional materials, identifying speaking venues and preparing presentation descriptions are just a few of the tasks that have popped up along the way.  Not to mention trying to come up with an answer to the question “So what’s your next book about?” Yikes! Talk about pressure.


We get by with a little help from our friends

As in all things in life, accomplishing something worthwhile is almost impossible without a support group.  In our case, this has gone well beyond a few encouraging words.  There’s no way we could have created all the content for this book without the generous help of so many wonderful gardeners, designers, photographers and bloggers, among them Jenny Peterson, Kerry Michaels, Robin Stockwell, Theresa Loe, Kim Parnell, Jim Charlier, Shawna Coronado, Laura Schaub, Christina Salwitz, Angela Davis, Jim Martin, Michelle Derviss Helen and Sarah Battersby, Michelle H, Baylor Chapman and Lynn Felici-Gallant.  Not to mention excellent advice from experienced authors like Debra Lee Baldwin.

Thanks everyone, for joining me on this journey!

Photo courtesy of Michelle Saechao

Wordless Wednesday: Succulents!

 

With thanks to Robin Stockwell for showing Rebecca and me around his beautiful nursery Succulent Gardens yesterday. (And yes, the same Robin Stockwell responsible for Flora Grubb's famous succulent wall.)