Hey Friends! (You guys are our friends, right?)
We have a confession to make to you all right here on the
internet. Are you ready? We are total and completely
undeniable nerds. Whew, we said it. We always have
been. More to that point, we love to lose ourselves in books and the
worlds that they create for us. We are going to assume that a lot of
you feel the same way and that you too spend countless hours on the internet
reading threads about your favorite books in-between actually reading and rereading
all your favorite books.
But, dear reader, have you ever thought about writing a book
for yourself? Have you ever created an idea so meaningful and
influential (at least to yourself) that you had to share it with the
world? Have you tried to write it down?
Here’s the deal. It’s a lot of work to write a
book. Forget coming up with a noteworthy idea and writing and
rewriting until it resembles something coherent. There’s publishing
to think about, editing, marketing, all the boring stuff (to some) that has to
be done for the book to be successful. And then, after all that
work, people might not like it. And so, we have another confession
to make: We (both of us) have let these things prevent us from writing a book. It has always been in the back of our minds, even
before we met each other.
We are going to guess that this is the case for at least some
of you guys, too (we are doing a lot of assuming today, but hey, all of the
most complicated engineering problems can be solved if you have enough
assumptions). And that’s completely fair. There are a lot
of questions to be asked when writing a book and sometimes the answers are
scary. We are both engineers and in the engineering spirit, we
question everything. We approach every situation with the same
logical, stepwise manner, and we ask questions, a lot of questions. How
much time will it take to write the novel? What are the steps to get
it published? What is the cost? Is the idea
marketable? What are the risks? What steps can be taken
to mitigate the risk? What is the chance for failure? How
large will the failure be? Where will the failure be, with the
equipment, with the customer, with the quality of the writing, with the
marketing? And the list goes on…
Today we are announcing to the world that we are throwing
all the risk analysis out the window. We are going for something
big. Something bigger than www.zazzle.com/Catpicsallday*
. We are going to co-write a novel (because everything is more
manageable when you have an awesome team). There will be no risk analysis, no mitigation,
and we may fail. This could be the biggest failure of our
lives. But we are going to write the novel we’ve always wanted to
give to the world (and wanted to read). The customer might not like it,
a publisher might not see any worth, an editor might tell us to scrap the idea
and go in a different direction. These are all things that can
happen, but we are going for it anyway. We will be having many fun
and entertaining discussions with each other about the direction, the
characters, and the plot points that move the novel forward. There will be
plenty of erasing and starting over by our own accord. One of the
perks with being in a great team, we don’t get offended when the other says an
idea sucks in so many words :D. Instead,
it can become the theme for comical blog-posts. Lucky for us, the engineering
side of our brain helps out with that! I mean, we’ve written like 6 blog posts so far, so we
clearly know what we are doing.
So in addition to all the other random things we decide are blog-worthy, we are now going to provide insight into our book-writing process. We’ll be sure to share with you all our inspirations, our writing techniques, resources we’ve found helpful, all our frustrations, personal successes, and hopefully some self-discovery along the way. And then with some insight, hopefully some of you will choose to do the same and follow your creative dreams.
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| A Possible hint at our theme for the novel. That and Quinn likes the night vision feature. |
So, here we are in another moment of clarity. Our
lives are (once again) taking a new turn that hopefully won’t end with us
bruised and battered along the road (although that is very possible considering
we may develop over-confidence due to our kickboxing skillz). We
hope you enjoy our adventure through the process of discovery and our
engineering mindset, mixed with our bizarre imaginations, of how to write a
meaningful story. If, nay, when, we get to the stage of being edited
and preparing to submit to publishers, you all will be the first to get
information about the actual story. In the meantime, we’ll be
dropping hints and pieces of the book for you all to sample (we do want this to
be somewhat a surprise). This is our new beginning, writing the
Memoirs of Our Imaginations.
Until
then,
Alice
& Quinn
