My Book is Out!

EVE'S SECOND CHANCE

After a self-publishing hiccup this week, my new book really is live. I guess a book on second chances needed just that during the self-publishing process.

In May of 2021, three and a half years ago, I started this Substack. I was doing an inventory of old podcasts and essay material, and writing a simple course for the ladies I was coaching on Zoom. I named a series “Memoir/Handbook” and soon realized I was probably writing a book. I’d go away to escape the madness in Los Angeles and write, uninterrupted for hours and hours, near the ocean. Then I’d walk on the beach with a notebook and a pen in case anything I wrote echoed back to me in a new way. I stopped hearing songs in my head, and instead heard sentences and paragraphs from this project. I never thought I’d write a book, and I never considered myself an “author.”

I did have a hunch about being an author though, on a summer vacation to the town where we now live. I stood on a dock and heard a voice (somehow) that said “I am an author and I live in North Carolina.” That delighted me until it sent me into an emotional spiral because my husband was emphatically resisting the idea of moving out of CA. The only thing to do was let go, until I was in the back end of Kindle publishing on my couch in NC, and the application kept calling me an author, so I added it to my bio. A dual purpose of sharing this is to prove the power of prayer.

Pain Became Progress

I also started this Substack because, as many readers know, I was in pain. Beginning in 2020, everything was changing for me personally, faster than the cultural and societal shifts. I was experiencing a radical re-orientation to God and a restoration of God’s will for my life in a way I hadn’t had the guts to embrace before. I was using the Hallow app and finding that the thirst I constantly managed in the yoga world could be quenched by my origin religion if only I averted my eyes away from the suspicion, and toward God and my relationship with Him. Yesterday I listened intently to the CEO of that life-changing app and retraced my steps back to when I first opened it - and how much that meant for my future. I cannot deny that I am being restored by the very thing I once defiantly mocked and rejected - even in public and on stage.

I was navigating a new paradigm and getting a lot of clarity on obstacles that had been in my way during my first podcast “Something Better.” I was able to see them clearly, and therefore they vaporized. Writing this Substack felt like galloping toward solution, to sort it all out. Deep talks with the author of my book’s foreword, whose constant public persecution has only sent her closer to God, kept me courageous and consistent.

I am most proud of how messy, instinctive, and imperfect this Substack was and is. I am encouraged by my willingness to fail in public.

It shreds my fear of what others think.

This Substack was a lifeline for me. It tested me as much as it comforted me. I got hate mail and I got thank you notes full of relief. I tried not to take either personally -they were all just signals of the polarization everywhere. I kept going. I discovered that since 2020, many people have been encouraged to be the authority over another soul’s personal narrative and experience. That became interesting enough to start a book on MINE. Because my story is mine, just like your story is YOURS.

Allowing Myself to Be a Fallible Human Paved Way for a Book

I kept my focus on the idea of useful material in one place to help other women. In three years I deliberately avoided advice, other people’s process, writer’s groups, self-publishing conventions or concepts like “writer’s block.” I just woke up every morning either obedient to the challenge of creating something that women will be able to understand, or in need of a short break from it.

During the self-publishing process in the KDP framework, it seemed as though I did everything that an author can do incorrectly, which makes sense because teacher feedback on me, since kindergarten, has been “she doesn’t follow directions well.” (This drives my husband nuts.) I used the delays to pray to be released of the fear of offering my story to the public. Having spent many years on stage and releasing albums, I know that to create is one thing, and to release the creation means granting permission for it to belong to the audience. That took prayer. I also used delays as an opportunity to create a companion album which is everywhere you can find digital music. It is an album of demos and unreleased songs that relate to the material in the book, some very rough and included for the feels. Delays were productive and seemed to matter and make sense in retrospect. I will probably work smarter for the next book.

Guidance and reflections on publishing this book from anyone other than my indispensable associate who gets tech, applications, AND the material would have been an interruption. Man, I wonder who she may become! Possibly a writer or publisher herself.

Now. Before I start sounding like a woke, inclusive, permissive “crying at work” corporate TV commercial, or a “coming out of nowhere” woke liberal entertainer, let me explain why I am emphasizing this imperfect process.

It is because

1. I believe the future is: paving one’s own way, beginning with telling yourself the truth. I suppose I could have sought a publishing deal, and I did try a few times, but I kept getting this sense that entering a business full of money laundering and hollow book deals that move the culture to Marxism and not souls to solution, was not my jam. Could be an excuse, probably is in part. But also, I did not trust any editors who are in the officialdom publishing world - nor even the ones adjacent to it, like the guy who refunded my money overnight and blocked me from his Substack after I sent him my manuscript. Reminder - it’s a book for women who are dreaming about getting married and having babies, y’all.

2. I believe we no longer have the luxury of telling ourselves the truth while excluding the culture, politics, and what has happened in the last four years. Maybe you got a shot, maybe you didn’t, maybe you think Trump is evil, maybe you know what Obama did, maybe you think RFK Jr. is nuts, maybe you saw the chronic childhood disease timeline alongside the date of Pharma’s liability hall pass on childhood vaccines... What matters the most is not your “side” and the big emotions you feel about it. What matters is calmly COMMUNICATING with others about it. We are all walking around in person honoring a radio silence that we pretend we aren’t in - I am too. I was utterly destroyed by what happened to me in LA - I am not leading with politics and culture when I get invited to an event in my new town, even while it is a better match to my values. My willingness to keep quiet is, in and of itself, God reshaping me and maturing me. However, we are only beginning a season of healing, like a cast we all need for a bone that has to be still and heal. When that cast comes off, the limb has to move and get blood flow. And we the people will be the same. We must TALK ABOUT IT. In person. Without irrational emotion and with consideration of critically thought-through facts, in good faith. Many of us are boldly expressing ourselves online (even anonymously) and are quiet in person, myself included. I ran from Facebook with my hair on fire in 2020, despite it being a source of digital income for music. When I was invited back to Facebook by a weekly Bible Study class I just completed at my church, I opened my laptop and closed it. I needed a circle of women I didn’t know online, only in person. We must admit and merge the polarization within us. Our minds and our relationships have been hijacked. There are spouses on two “sides,” being quiet in person and loud online. I see posts like “Donald Trump destroyed my marriage.” That is giving away personal power instead of taking it back and communicating with trust. I accomplished communication in my marriage, and a little in social experiences in person, and with loved ones. Everyone is somewhere on the path to healing. I am on the path with you toward what I am suggesting we all do.

This Book Led to Communication

The process of editing this book required that I “test” it on two willing subscribers of my work. One of them got the Covid shot, one of them fiercely stood against it. One of them was liberal, one was conservative. We all had a relationship with God we were actively seeking and working on. None of us share the same religion. Sometimes we spontaneously prayed on the sessions, mostly for others, but I remember one prayer on this process. The conversations we had on Zoom were incredible. You will meet both women in the foreword of the book. We often said “everyone needs to talk like this” and I would say, “I pray we all do.”

Why, Yes - I am Promoting a Book For Singles Seeking an Emotionally Intimate Marriage.

This may be a bizarre promotional item for a book on finding love, but it is a book on finding love in TWENTY TWENTY FOUR - it requires context.

Joshua Lisec, the Internationally Bestselling Ghost Writer who read my final manuscript, appeared at a crucial juncture providing an affordable service that was a critical part of my process. He enlightened me - I had written a series and tried to jam it all into one book. He suggested what he called a “global edit” and suddenly I was ready to publish book one, for singles. Joshua was also instrumental because he teaches people to stop hiding, and to be open about their views in the context of entrepreneurial work. He said on a podcast we did that “cancel culture canceled itself.” I know Joshua to be a curious, articulate and clarifying writer, a loving husband and father of three who also goes to his local Catholic Church, in Ohio. However I recently found out that his book on the Trump assassination attempt means he’s a bad guy, according to CNN. Got it.

Let’s talk about it, friends. We gotta talk about it.

I am determined to get singles OFF SCREENS and into communication in person, which has not ever been more complex than it is now.

But here’s the thing, we ALL must get off screens and in person for communication - on topics that matter to US, not a network or a political party. This book defined how and where to start, with reasonable communication skills. It is full of concepts we all know well, but they have been hijacked from us, an attempt to get innocent people to embrace utter sanity and moral relativism - the kind that serves no one in the end.

A published author should know her demographic and I do indeed know mine. I also think if a gal from my demo has an uncle who uses her bathroom on Thanksgiving and it happens to be by her tub, it could be an icebreaker, ya know? We are, after all, now actually healing from the very thing they sold us: “we are all in this together.”

It felt appropriate to share the whole story of the book’s inception today, in the place where it all started. A world of awareness opened up to me when I answered a desire to comfort the single girls by explaining I was once there too - only it wasn’t as hard back in the 2010s. Everyone else is welcome to the book too, and its greater context.

Thank you for reading this and for being a part of a Substack that led me to this book.

Here is Eve’s Second Chance, Heal Marry, Prosper.