12/06/2026
In the coming week, my manuscript should finally be ready for professional assessment. To say I'm excited would be an understatement and to say I'm terrified would also be accurate.
Over the last couple of years, writing this book has become a little like raising a child. The early stages felt like a pregnancy of sorts with ideas, thoughts, fragments of stories and life observations scribbled on scraps of paper and saved on my hard drive. Then came the long process of nurturing it, shaping it, feeding it, watching it grow into something that closely resembles a fully formed individual.
Now I find myself at the point where I have to hand it over to someone else for a professional opinion, and I feel that's a very vulnerable place to be. It's like taking that leap out of a perfectly working airplane and hoping your parachute opens!
Like any parent sending their child off on the first day of school, I know I have to let it step out into the world and find its own way. I can only hope it's treated kindly and judged fairly although even if it doesn't resonate with everyone the way I hope it will, I will still love it. It has been one of the most challenging, rewarding, frustrating, enlightening and cathartic journeys I've ever undertaken.
Writing a non-fiction, memoir style book is an incredibly intimate process. It asks you to examine your thoughts, your experiences, your beliefs, your memories and sometimes even the parts of yourself you had forgotten or would rather leave hidden.
Since embarking on this journey, I've seen many discussions about using AI to write books. Like most tools, in my opinion I think AI has its place, but I think to write an entire book with AI is doing yourself a disservice.
One of the greatest gifts writing has given me has been the journey itself.
It's been in wrestling with ideas, finding my voice, working through self-doubt, revisiting old memories, discovering new perspectives and shaping those experiences into something meaningful.
Happy to use AI to check my spelling or find an alternative word for me so I don't need to pull out the thesaurus, but writing is a deeply creative and personal experience, and I would have missed so many lessons that process has taught me if I didn't do it myself. To be clear, I am a novice, and absolutely not a professional in this space and this is just merely my opinion from my own experience, but to me, writing is a little like sitting across from someone at dinner. We can spend the evening looking at our phones, or we can engage in real conversation. One loses connection and the other creates connection. Personally, I like to be phone free when I go to dinner and to have that intimate time with the people I am sharing a meal with, but there are others who are not that way inclined and that is perfectly fine if that's your jam.
The book may be the outcome, but the real gift has been becoming the person who wrote it. Anyway, watch this space. My book is very close to being born. 🥰
