Well, the obvious choice is a book about some topic related to saving money.
I feel passionate about contentment and thankfulness too, though, so I imagine I could write at least a small book on the topic.
I would never in a million years consider writing anything but non-fiction, though. I don’t like thinking up imaginary storylines or characters! I would much rather write a how-to type of book.
Since I have been blogging regularly since 2008, I have written enough words to fill many books.
But the idea of writing an entire book just seems overwhelming to me. Blog posts are small and manageable. A book is not.
Blog posts are easy to work in around family life. A book is not.
So I don’t really anticipate that I will ever write a book; I will probably just keep typing blog posts!
Your posts about joy, thankfulness, fulfillment, happiness and other values deserve a wider audience. I don’t think I’m alone in my admiration for your handling of often complex and hard to discuss subjects. A compilation of these value-based posts would make a great book!
Agreed. You do have a gift for discussing difficult topics without alienating people. Which is apparently a very rare gift these days . . .
I have lost count of the number of people who have told me, “You should write a book!” Their faith in me is appreciated, but I don’t think I have the temperament to write a full-length book. Like you, blog posts are definitely more my speed.
If I were to write a book, though? Hmm. Maybe humorous stories of country living? How to take your food from fur to table? Things no one tells you about parenting feral children in the middle of nowhere? All topics I cover already on my blog for free! Lucky Internet. 🙂
Writing a book is like eating an elephant. You do it a small bite at a time–not that I would ever actually eat an elephant. You could do it, Kristin. You too, Kristen. I think writing a book is much easier than blogging. It has an end point. Coming up with interesting blog posts day after day looks hard to me!
Essays. Daily life essays.
Or, perhaps fiction. A Westward Expansion story, probably.
But I will never be able to focus long enough to write a book. I also don’t have that type of endurance.
Unlike Kristen and Kristin, my blog is still in the draft stage. Maybe by year’s end I’ll get it live. If not, no one is really missing anything. If I did get it live, would I even have any readers? Guessing not so much. The heyday of blogs was a decade ago and those that started then (or a bit before) and endured are the ones that are good now … uh, Kristen and Kristin.
Have you read the Tim Cotton book “Detective in the Dooryard”? That’s where a blog comes to life, and it seems he has been successful. Or, Peggy Rowe’s two books — ditto. I see no reason you couldn’t do that with blog-post-esque essays, Kristen … and Kristin.
My grandmother’s life story. She was born in NYC but did not find out she was born in the US until after WWII, after surviving Nazi camps and was at a displaced person camp trying to get to what everyone considered the perfect country, the U.S. Somehow the paperwork, and this was before computers, showed up that said she was born in the U.S. and so she was a citizen and could immediately come to the U.S. Turned out her father and mother had been immigrants to the U.S. and when the wife died, her father did what was apparently common back then (we are talking 1903 or so) and sold her to farmers in Lithuania as an indentured servant, along with two siblings. She was so young she had no memory of that or that she was in fact an American by birth. So she returned to her birth city in her 40s, unable to speak the language, bringing her two children with her. By then my mother was pregnant with me and married so that resulted in my father eventually coming, too. Years and years later, there was an incident where a Russian literally jumped ship to an American ship and asked for asylum, but they returned him to the Russians. My grandmother knew his mother when they both worked on the same farm and wondered if she, too, was an “orphan” who was really an American. She tracked down the birth records and eventually, because a child’s citizenship goes by the mother’s citizenship, the man was released from a Soviet jail and he and his mother were brought to the U.S., his mother’s birth country. My grandmother did all this, which included dragging herself to D.C. and appealing to then Senator Jacob Javits for help, all while still barely speaking English and having no driver’s license or a lot of money. Years and years ago there was a movie about it and although my grandmother’s part in all of it was pretty much erased, the man did meet my grandmother and showered her with gifts in thanks. All in all, my grandmother was a pretty amazing women, even without these events. “I am strong like ox,” she used to say when I would ask her how she could survive all the things that happened to her. And she was. (Imagine the therapy she would have been sent to these days, after finding out she was sold for profit by her father, who went on to have a new family and never made contact with the kids from his first family again!)
The movie was The Defection of Simas Kudirka. Not all the facts were accurate, but close enough.
Holy. Cow. Awesome story.
I feel like you need to write this book from your grandmother’s perspective!! What a fascinating story!