A year and a half. That’s how long I’ve been working on my book proposal.
This is not the speed I normally go. I rush out of the gates with excitement, never stopping to look back. This project started that way too. The first month, I had a proposal completely written. Seventy pages. The overview of the book, a summary of each chapter, the market analysis, why this book should exist and why I should be the one to write it.
Done. Or so I thought.
Since then, I’ve written six entirely different proposals. Six. Each one seventy to ninety pages. And more iterations within each one of those than I can count.
If you had told me at the start that I’d still be working on this proposal a year and a half later, I’m not sure I would have begun.
But here’s the truth. Where the idea is now is so far from where it began. And I needed every one of those six proposals, and every iteration of each one, to land where I am.
Some things in life require time to fully form. There’s a creative gestation period, and that time varies. You don’t get to choose how long.
In the past year and a half, I’ve gone from being totally submerged. Thinking about the book as I fell asleep. Waking up excited to dive straight back in. To stepping away completely for long stretches. Thinking that if I looked at it one more time, I might lose my marbles.
I think that’s part of the process too.
Moving between intense creative drive and a calm space where your attention wanders, no longer zeroed in. Both states give something different to the work. The drive builds. The distance clarifies. I needed both.
And I’m learning to trust my own flow through all of it.
That part feels new. I’ve spent a lot of my life suspicious of the slow seasons. Reading them as failure. As stalling. As proof I’d lost the thread. But the slow seasons were doing something. They just weren’t doing it where I could see.
After a year and a half, I’m very near ready to submit.
That feels good to write.
I can feel the time is almost here. And I’m grateful for the hundreds of pages that led to this concept. Not one of them wasted. Every discarded proposal was the idea trying to find its truest shape.
If you’re in the slow part of something right now. The part where you’ve stepped away and you’re wondering if you’ve abandoned it or if it’s abandoned you. Remember, you might just be giving the project, and you, the time to find the truest shape.
