A Note of Gratitude…to ‘Somebody’ for ‘Everybody’

One piece of advice I beg authors to take from me, and that is to write from your heart. It’s fine if you chose to work with an editor who helps you clean up your writing. However, if you look on that page and the voice coming back at you, don’t sound nothing like you, then you must insist on having them words rearranged and arranged back to the way you wrote, dictated, or meant them. Be adamant. No compromising. This is important.

It’s also fine if others looking over your left and right shoulder tell you what’s not working, and what is… or if someone calls you difficult, kooky, or tells you your story won’t sell and NOBODY will read it. Like really? Who is Nobody anyway? Is this one-body, three-to-three thousand bodies, everybody, or somebody nobody will ever care to see or know?

Generally good editors and the best ‘reading’ critics don’t work like this. Great editors want the book to shine. They want YOU to come off the page because it is not only a reflection of you, but them too.

All that said, I now have 16 books (captioned in the heading illustration) that I must select 10 from to create my favorites’ list for 2015. They are made up of traditional, independent and one self-published in-print title(s). And, I know, why not create a top 20’s list… or however many books I read this year that do it for me. After all, any book that placates my heart, settles my stomach, fixes my mood, uplifts my spirit or gets me to filling a notebook full of thoughts… going into overtime thinking about the content, is a book that goes on my keeper shelf, whether it ends up on my top 10 list or not.

But this is the whole point of this post. Imagine for a sec, what a book must have done to ‘somebody’ to end up ranking at the top of *my* best of the best list. And yeah, I may be but one person in the world, but authors’, you mean the world to me.

This is going to be a difficult task for sure, and I still have 15 more books to read. Yet, due to some authors writing deeply from their heart I am now excited, anxious and a little bit in for a humbling challenge ahead.

Again, to all writers considering, or in the midst of writing your memoirs or books; when you write from the heart, your book is going to mean the world to SOMEBODY, too. Trust me, repeating after me. “I AM SOMEBODY!”