Who Am I?

I’m an author and an editor, a wife and a mother, a singer and a djembe wannabe. Join me as I blog about the process of taking a book from nearly finished to being in the bookstores.

The title of my book is “Trust the Mystery: Questions, Quotes and Quantum Wisdom.”

I’ve been writing this book for a while and it kept morphing and evolving under my pen. While the working titles kept changed, so did my focus. Or was it the other way around? Anyhow, I kept getting stuck and leaving it alone for long chunks of time.

My daughter suggested to me some months ago—years ago?—that if I wrote about how my book writing is going, it might get going again. And she was right. She is right.

I started a small journal and wrote in it faithfully a number of times—”Wrote nothing today.”

“Wrote nothing today.”

But then one day, I came across Scrivener and was able to start organizing the contents of my book in a way that I could really grasp where I was going. Scrivener makes it really easy to move around chapters and parts of chapters and so on, without losing anything, and that really helped. And then the writing just started, because I could write little bits at a time, and it wasn’t nearly so daunting.

Once my Manuscript was big enough in Scrivener, I migrated the content over to MS Word 2003. Then I upgraded to MS Word 2013. And gradually figured out some of the great features in that program, like Table of Contents (okay, it was in earlier versions, but somehow this time it seemed easier) and comment boxes.

My book reached over 110,000 words, but they were not all the right words. I spent the next five months, until mid-February to get those words right, by writing and rewriting. At that time, my book’s title was “Speaking of Spirit” and its focus was how spirit and communication intertwine in a spiral. The book now focuses on the more we trust the mystery, the closer we align with our true nature.

My publisher also made a suggestion—to write a blog about my upcoming book. And so this blog is about two things—the contents of my book and the process of bringing it from pen to print.

You’ll probably think, “Pen! Surely, you’re not still writing it by hand?!”

And I can answer, “No. But I keep getting great ideas about how to tweak it or expand it or delete bits and if I’m in the middle of doing something else, I might make a handwritten note about the latest and greatest idea.

So, I’ll be blogging from time to time about the process of getting a book to print. And about what I’m writing about.

Nina Shoroplova

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