I asked some people to ask me questions about my self published book, Welcome to the Middle, Kid. I got some great questions that I had a blast answering. Thank you to all the people
who was asked these wonderful questions! Also, I’m posting this blog before releasing my podcast but
during my podcast, I’ll talk about some different aspects of my writing of the book, so stay tuned!
What was the easiest part of writing?
I feel like the easiest part of the whole writing process was when I sat down at a coffee shop or on my couch and I had no distractions and
just wrote for 2 hours. This is kind of a run-around of the question because for some reason it was hard for me to answer but I’d say when you have no
distractions and unlimited coffee refills at Starbucks, that made writing so much easier.
What was the hardest part of writing?
Now, this answer I know right away. The hardest part was remembering things. If you’ve read my book, you know that I started having rapid
memory loss at ages 21 and 22. I can’t remember my childhood, middle school, high school, and college in the sense that I remember snippets but not whole memories. I had to ask my mom a lot of questions and that was difficult
on her as well. That’s why my book is so small, I can’t remember my life very well. So that was DEFINITELY the hardest
part.
Favorite thing that has happened to you post publishing?
My 2 talks I gave! I absolutely love public speaking and when I got asked to talk about the mental health portion of my book, I jumped on it. I had a Q&A during one talk and got
some really
good feedback on what my readers were thinking when reading the book, so that was cool. I have an author poster that I made for my events and it’s oddly so awesome to me. My face
on a big
poster. Nice.
What was your biggest inspiration to write?
The people in my life and the people around me. Whenever I told someone about my life story, they always said I should write a book. I always liked writing and was really good at it,
although I didn’t realize it until later on in my life. But a book? No way. Except one day, I wanted to write a blog on my experiences and when I did, I decided a book is actually a really good idea. It gave me
something to do so I didn’t go insane because I had many days off work in the sense that I wasn’t getting any hours. So I sat down, wrote my first draft, it was awful, I
stopped for about a year, then revised the draft and started writing more. So to the people who told me that they would read a book I wrote about my life, thanks.
Who are your favourite writers/books?
I love the After series by Anna Todd even though some people very much hate it. I LOVE IT OKAY?! When I was in high school and college, I used
to be obsessed with the book Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie and I even wanted to get a tattoo to remind me how much I loved the book, but that didn’t play out. As a writer, I took inspiration from Shane Dawson’s book,
It Get’s Worse in the sense that I wanted to make an essay book. That’s why the second half of the book is so random, because I’m trying to play off Shane (and it didn’t really work out...maybe book
two I’ll do it!)
What part was the most rewarding?
This seems dumb, but I think when people showed me pictures of the book when they received it or were reading it. It was so surreal that people
liked me enough to read a silly old book I wrote that was only 100 pages. Plus, I always knew I wanted my face on the cover so it’s cool that people are seeing my face everywhere, even if it’s kind of an unflattering
picture...
What was the process like from start to publishing?
To keep it fairly short, I don’t have Word so I started my writing my first draft in Notebook, which is an awful application to write a book in. But during my second draft, I got
my hands on a better
application to write on and I couldn’t stop writing from November 2017 to when I published it, which was January 1st, 2018. It seems like a short time to write it all, but I already had some written chapters and some memories I wrote down a few years before so I just revised the heck out of them, which really
only took a couple of days or sometimes just hours. I’m extremely impulsive so the minute I got done writing it, I made my cover, got some quotes for the back of the book from some friends, and then found a self publishing
company online. I put it all together after Christmas 2017 and I was just so excited about it, that I released it shortly after. Yes, it has spelling mistakes and it’s nowhere near perfect ( I have no idea how to find
an editor and I don’t have much money), but it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done.
Again, I want to thank everyone who asked these questions and I hope you guys got some good insight on how I wrote my book and enjoyed reading about it! When the podcast episode comes out, I'll link you guys to it!
