...Steve and I both published posts on our respective blogs about our plans to turn an idea into reality. At the time we weren't sure what it was going to be, but we were sure that it was going to be something. Today we met face-to-face — one of maybe only four or five times in the whole year that we met in person about this project. We're doing some final copy-editing, and in a couple of days we'll be submitting the iBooks Author file to the iTunes store for review. We plan to make the book available at the end of January.

I wanted to take a photograph of us at our "meeting," but I forgot. So instead I am providing a photograph of one of Steve's comments on a printout of one of the pages he was reviewing. I couldn't understand what he had written, so I took a picture of it with my phone, emailed it to him, and waited for him to explain it to me. He got back to me, via email, saying that it was a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery that he thought was interesting and connected to a portion of a chapter:

You'll have to download the book to see if and where this quote gets placed.

As promised, here's a post about the process we used to produce our book in spite of the many competing demands on our time (more to come).   

Once Reshan and I decided that we were going to write this book, we settled in to a disciplined routine.  We treated the project like a job, which meant showing up to work on it at regular intervals outside the hours we spend at work or with our families.  We worked during the proverbial "nights and weekends," or more precisely, mornings and weekends.  What we found was a pretty simple formula: 40 to 60 minutes each morning, six days a week, week after week, makes a book.  

It's a shame that writing is often wrapped up in mystical garb -- as if you have to be divinely inspired to write poems or short stories or articles or books.  Feeling energized / inspired is certainly helpful when you sit before a blank screen or page.  But if you feel like you can't approach blank screens or pages or canvases unless you feel a certain way (i.e., inspired) then you probably won't fill in that blankness with any regularity, which means you won't create with any regularity.  

On good days, writers write.  On the other days, they type. Words add up to sentences add up to paragraphs add up to chapters.  40 to 60 minutes each morning, six days a week, week after week, makes a book.  

Maybe we're just getting older, or maybe the fact that we don't have much time has caused us to develop a pragmatic approach to our passion projects. But we certainly weren't alone in 2013; in fact, our process was similar to the one championed all over the Internet this past year.    

2013 was the year where people like Austin Kleon (of Steal Like an Artist fame) and Maria Popova (of Brainpickings.com fame), two great sources of online leadership in the creative mentorship category, started to really hammer home the idea that writers and artists need routines.  

Popova, in a great post on creativity, quoted Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

And Kleon, whose "something small, every day" approach mirrors our own, quoted Oliver Burkman (quoting Chuck Close) in another post: 

What will you be working on in 2014?  Let us know . . . maybe we can help.