The Unexpected Book Update

January continues to be the longest month of the year but not for long! We arrived at the end of it, and tomorrow the most perfect month of them all starts. Austin Kleon always encourages people to start a daily activity on February 1st, and then stick to it for four weeks.

Could I be completely open with you? If I were to try anything new, I would get more sleep. I've never gotten enough sleep in my life, and all doctors and professors say that getting enough sleep is good for you. Allegedly. What do you think? Is it worth a shot?

I wrote a book?!

Anyway, this newsletter is being written under the weather so yeah. As you may remember, in 2022 I started writing a book. And I wrote it. Really. Finished in November 2023, the first draft has been sitting quietly on a cloud drive catching electronic dust. Recently, my desperate cry for help to start editing was answered, and wow, my friend H. delivered like a product-management queen that she is (thank you!). Thank to her daily reminders, I've corrected the whole manuscript (fancy word for my humble sentences!). Next steps would include printing the 50k words, rearranging it and finding gaps that maybe should be taken care of. And then... release it? That would be easy, wouldn't it? But I'm me so...

Do you know the idea of crop rotation? Long story short, our great great great grandparents would grow a different kind of produce over the time. In oder to, let the soil rest, rebuild and recover. While I was working on Project Wombat (the book), I wrote letters to you but also another, completely different version of the book.

So now I have two books. They overlap theme-wise (women in tech, career growth as a software engineer etc.) but content-wise not so much.

TWO BOOKS.

What the actual heck? How has it happen?

What am I supposed to do? Has anyone of you published a non-fiction book before? What the heck should I do? Send it out in episodes? Publish it? Which one?

Anybody here knows this (self-)publishing business? Or somebody who knows it? How does it work in Germany? Would I must open a company? I have no idea.

Haha, this letter is Erkältungsmittel-infused, and creative panic.

Thank you for reading.

Love,

Wiktoria

PS. This week's music corner brings us again Martha Argerich and Ravel's piano concerto: