(Oh, and by the way? I haven’t updated this site in FOREVER. It’s full of old info about things I don’t do anymore and contains many, many broken links. I’m far too lazy and uninterested to fix it all. Have fun!)

Today, my writing partner Sean Platt and I published what we feel is the definitive self-publishing guide, called Write. Publish. Repeat: The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success. It’s the how-to manual detailing how we did it — not through some sort of internet trickery or BS “gold rush” mentality, but by creating a solid, sensible, sustainable business that treats our books like products.

For today and tomorrow, it’s HALF PRICE. During that same time, it also comes with a bonus book: Sean’s book Writing Online, which is the freelancer’s companion piece to this book.

Here’s the product description:

Get it here:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble Nook
Kobo

In 2013, Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt published 1.5 million words and made their full-time livings as indie authors. In Write. Publish. Repeat., they tell you exactly how they did it: how they created over 15 independent franchises across 50+ published works, how they turned their art into a logical, sustainable business, and how any independent author can do the same to build a sustainable, profitable career with their writing.

Write. Publish. Repeat. explains the current self-publishing landscape and covers the truths and myths about what it means to be an indie author now and in the foreseeable future. It explains how to create books your readers will love and will want to return to again and again. Write. Publish. Repeat. details expert methods for building story worlds, characters, and plots, understanding your market (right down to your ideal reader), using the best tools possible to capture your draft, and explains proven best practices for editing. The book also discusses covers, titles, formatting, pricing, and publishing to multiple platforms, plus a bit on getting your books into print (and why that might not be a good idea!). But most importantly, Write. Publish. Repeat. details the psychology-driven marketing plan that Sean and Johnny built to shape their stories into “products” that readers couldn’t help but be drawn into — thus almost automatically generating sales — and explores ways that smart, business-minded writers can do the same to future-proof their careers.

This book is not a formula with an easy path to follow. It is a guidebook that will help you build a successful indie publishing career, no matter what type of writer you are … so long as you’re the type who’s willing to do the work.

Yes, we published a lot of words… but more importantly, we created 12 product lines. 12 product funnels that are based around solid sales and business strategies that haven’t changed for as long as book sales have been around, regardless of the medium: Write the best books you can. Package them as professionally and appealingly as you can. Make people want to get the next book, and show them how to do it in a way that benefits you both. Connect with your readers, and treat them like gold. And so on.

And I have to say, the best thing about this book launch isn’t even the sales. Those are great, and necessary, and I need and want them… but most of the juice has come from the excitement. People keep tweeting and emailing us and saying how inspired they are and how NEEDED they feel this book is. It’s a serious charge, and makes me think I’m serving my purpose in the world.

Here’s a few:

It’s tough to find more honest and straight-forward 
marketing advice than what you’ll get from these indie authors.
— Jane Friedman, former publisher of Writer’s Digest

The most important book on self-publishing I’ve ever read.
— Karol Gajda

Consider it the most valuable guide book to publishing success.
— Jim Kukral, Author Marketing Club

EVERYTHING that we could think to include is in this book. It’s A to Z. We talk about the new realities of the self-publishing marketplace, pre-production, writing and editing, post-production to get your books ready to sell, creating marketing funnels, building and engaging with a reader list, finding your true fans (and letting others go), and much more.

Anyway, if you’re a writer and would like to actually build a business from your writing (instead of floundering around in a hobby), we wrote this book for you.

But be sure to grab it now, while it’s half price and comes with the bonus book.

Anyway, I thought I’d make a list of the truths I’ve discovered in case anyone out there is wondering about them. NOW: I’ve tested these things and can vouch for their truth, but feel free to ignore me if you’d like the experience of screwing up for yourself. It’s cool.

Here we go:

1. If you want to lose weight or see your abs, you need to eat less.
Nobody wants to eat less or eat better, so if they want to lose weight, they keep eating and simply exercise more. I know I did. I have been aggressively weight training for 20 years and have experimented with just about every way of training out there. I have done powerlifting. I have done strongman workouts. I have done Crossfit. I once did four major endurance events in two months, and I trained 20+ hours a week during that time. But despite all of that, I only finally got a six pack when I got my diet under control and started tracking what I ate religiously using an app. There’s an expression that says “you can’t out-train a bad diet” and one that says “abs are made in the kitchen.” Both are 100% true.

2. The best moneymaking and success strategy is to be awesome.
It’s amazing how many people fret about perfecting their marketing strategy when what they have to offer is total shit. Sure, marketing and SEO and positioning matter… but only once you are producing awesome stuff. No matter how many times we talk about marketing funnels or KDP Select promotion strategy on the podcast, the bottom-line advice always boils down to, “Keep writing awesome books that people love.” That philosophy applies to everything.

3. Most people are lazy.
People say they want to make some kind of a change. They get good, solid advice. Then they do nothing. NOTHING. In most cases, failure is not the result of outside influences. In most cases, failure is due to a simple lack of effort. It’s an ugly truth, but it’s the truth, all right: most people don’t want what they claim to want badly enough to actually put in the work required to get it.

4. Guilt and regret won’t make your problems go away.
There’s no point in dwelling on bad things that happened or that you did in the past. Most people feel that it’s their duty to dwell on guilt, as if they’ll somehow be a horrible person if they refuse to keep feeling guilty. It’s not true. What happened happened. Move on.

5. Bitching won’t make your problems go away.
This one is hilarious to see in action. Why does your father always complain about his crappy car? Why does your neighbor complain about the government and taxes? Bitching and complaining does nothing. Action does something, but bitching is not action. Bitching is bitching. Yet people do it fervently, as if they think that bitching enough will, by itself, solve the problem.

6. Doggedly pursuing a stupid idea won’t turn it into it a smart idea.
I once tried to get a Ph.D in genetics. I hated my studies within a month, but I told myself that if I just stuck with it, I’d eventually love it and life would be grand. It didn’t, and eventually I wised up and quit. One of the best aphorisms I’ve ever heard is from the movie Christine, when Darnell says, “You can’t polish a turd.” So stop trying. That turd is a turd, and no matter how long you polish it, it won’t turn into a shiny new Plymouth Fury. And sure, Arnie got lucky in the movie, but his car turned out to be evil. There’s a lesson there.

7. You should always be yourself.
Ask any gay person if they’d rather go back into the closet and go back to pretending to be someone they’re not. I’ll bet you don’t get a yes. It’s always better to be open about who you are, what you do, what you like, and what you want out of life. I don’t mean to open a can of worms on this one, but sex is a huge issue here. We had a whole episode of our podcast about this if you’re interested. Just be warned that it is EXTREMELY NSFW AND NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN. (You’ve been warned; click here to listen.)

8. Worrying is useless.
Worry is like bitching. It changes nothing, but we feel like we’ve got to do it because if we don’t worry about something enough, it seems like we’re being flippant. But try something for me: the next time you’re worried about something, ask yourself how much the problem will improve if you worry really, really hard. That’ll fix things, right?

9. Most successes happen in small steps and take a long time.
This is the cornerstone message behind my Everyday Legendary community, which is filled with people who actually understand that most things worth doing take time. Almost nothing happens in huge, gestalt leaps. Want to become a champion ballerina or start a successful company? Get a little better every day, then repeat.

10. You shouldn’t buy what you can’t afford.
Want that TV? Wait until you have enough cash to pay for it. Want to take the vacation but need to borrow from your credit card (and then not pay it off in full) to do it? You’d better wait. I’ve violated this plenty. Sometimes, for necessities, it feels essential. I almost always regret it.

11. Nobody is rooting for you to fail.
The world isn’t out to get you. There’s no point in pretending that it is. People have their noses so far in their own business that they’re not paying attention to you and your potential failure. You simply don’t matter to them enough to root against. That means you’re free.

12. Nobody cares if you succeed.
This is the corollary to #11 above. Think Aunt Margaret will push your new book to all of her friends? Think that famous person who could really help you will hop on board with your fantastic idea? Nope. They don’t give a shit. Not really. They have their own issues. Your successes are up to you.

13. Nobody cares about your complaints.
I was once part of a group that really, really pissed me off. I made sure I let them know why I was leaving, and how unwelcome I felt. I didn’t think that they’d change and/or beg me to stay, but I thought they’d at least express concern or regret, or at least register some emotion. They didn’t. Same when my wife stormed out of a job under shitty conditions. Same with a bank that had hideous service. And so on. They don’t care, so make your feelings known… but then don’t expect a reaction, and certainly don’t expect change or for them to make it right.

14. There is very little that you truly need.
Food. Water. Air. Shelter. Those are the things you need. You do not need a house. A cardboard box covering your head will do just fine. It’s not ideal, but it will work. Most people inflate their personal cost of living by turning things that they merely want into things they feel they need. It’s okay to want things. It’s good to want things. But stop adding stress to your life by equating your gym membership or your car to your literal survival. If you lose most things, you and your family will continue to live and will still probably manage to be happy from time to time.

15. Everyone lives life according to their own rules, not yours.
Someone says something to you and you’re offended. You think they’re being a jerk, because you have a personal rule that says, “If you say X to someone, it’s because you want to insult them.” But that other person doesn’t necessarily have the same rules as you have. They’re responding according to their own rules, and in all probability, their rules say that they are responding appropriately. They may even think that you are the bad guy. So who’s right? Neither; you simply have different rules. The sooner you realize that everyone is trying to do the best they can in life with what they have (rather than going out of their way to be mean to you), the better.

16. Clueless people don’t know they’re clueless, and never will.
If you’re aghast that someone is a total dipshit and feel the need to show them the dipshit nature of their ways, don’t bother to try. It may be super-obvious to you that you really shouldn’t rest your testicles on the countertop while using the sink like some old men used to do at my gym, but they’re never going to have that epiphany. They may change to please you, but they will never think, “Wow, I was really dumb!”

17. It seldom makes sense to try to convince people you’re right.
I once heard Deepak Chopra call this as “the law of defenselessness.” It basically goes like this: Have your opinion, but release the pressing need you have to defend that opinion to other people. It’s fine to just believe something and not spend a bunch of time justifying your point of view, especially when the issue in question is just an opinion. (TIP: Most things — including those things you’re certain you’re right about — are actually opinions.)

18. You really can achieve just about anything.
It may take you a while, but you can in fact achieve most reasonable things and plenty of unreasonable things. You’ll see that if you stop deciding that things are impossible before even trying. (See also: Everyday Legendary’s central premise.)

19. The people you look up to are just as nervous as you are.
Succeeding gets a lot easier when you realize that everyone who has ever succeeded has doubted that things will work, has failed terribly, and has generally been where the rest of are: worrying and certain that they aren’t good enough. (Bonus fact: Those people you look up to also don’t start being bulletproof and perfect AFTER they’ve succeeded. They actually remain human until the day they die.)

20. Your worst-case scenario is seldom very bad.
Here’s a fun game: Ask yourself “what’s the worst that could happen?” about the thing that worries you most, and then keep asking it until you can’t ask anymore. Then, when you’re at the bottom of that chain of questions, ask yourself how terrible that end result would really be. Here’s an example: I might lose my job > I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills > I would lose my house and car > I’d have to declare bankruptcy > I’d have to move in with mom/dad/grandma or bum on a friend’s couch and have a bad credit rating. Now: is that scenario really THAT bad? Did you die? Are you ruined forever and ever? Will you be tortured? The truth is that most “worst case scenarios” are merely inconvenient, uncomfortable, or embarrassing.

So that’s my list. What are some of yours?

Why is that the way I’ve increasingly felt about the holidays? Because man, that’s not fucking cool. Christmas used to be awesome. There was all this anticipation and magic and specialness once upon a time, and I looked forward to that one day for the other 364, and then Christmas day arrived and it was nothing but excitement and fun times and bliss.

But then at some point, Christmas — and this is especially true if you celebrate Christmas, though the other folks definitely get plenty of shit shrapnel too — the season started to be about stress and manipulation. It became uncool.

Who stole Christmas from me, and why? What kind of a mean prick would steal Christmas, other than that green guy? (You know who I’m talking about. The Hulk, that’s who.)

But someone or something did steal it, and this year, the fact of that crime has really begun to work on me.

It all started when I noticed that this year, as in the past few years, the stores started putting up Christmas decorations and playing Musak Christmas carols over the speakers well before Halloween. That got me thinking. Why do they do that? And the answer is to get people spending earlier. Why else do they do that? Because after people spend early, they’ll then have two months to think about how they could also buy something else. And something else. And something else.

Then, around Thanksgiving, Robin and I started to make our Christmas lists — not lists of things we wanted, but lists of things we should get for other people.

We bought a few items and crossed those people off the list. Then we started asking ourselves questions: Wait… did we spend enough on this person? I mean, we spent $75 on that other person, so we should really get something else for the $50 person, right? Notice that there is no element of need or desire in this internal dialogue. It’s just about dollars. If we were to buy the $50 person a $25 item to level the scales even if it was something they didn’t need, that seemed like a sensible thing to do.

Further down the list, we got to my grandmothers, who are both in senior communities and live in small apartments. These ladies actively try to give things to me whenever I see them, because they see their days growing short and want to distribute possessions rather than accumulate them. Ditto for my “spartan artist” dad, minus the senior community and a few decades. But I’ve got to get them all something, right? Because that’s what Christmas is about?

My grandfather is hard. So is Robin’s brother. We usually end up getting gift cards for these people because they can never tell us something specific they need. Usually someone gives more than they receive. I figure we might as well make things easier, so rather than Person A giving Person B a $50 gift card and Person B giving Person A a $75 gift card, it’d be so much easier for Person B to just give Person A $25 in cash to account for the difference.

Here’s the balance I owe you from our usual transaction. Merry fucking Christmas.

For Robin’s dad Frank — and I swear I’m not kidding about this — her mother routinely takes something that Frank has bought for himself and wraps it. Then we pay her whatever that thing cost.

And hey, giving is the easy part. The hard part is when people start asking us what we want.

Hell, I don’t know. I’m 36. I make a good living. When I want stuff these days, I buy it. I don’t keep a list of things I’ve got to have and then deliberately not get it so that someone else can.

So I’m like, I don’t know… a book light for my Kindle? A new alarm clock? A few pairs of jeans? Austin has a full list, so I let his spill onto mine. I told my mom to get me Super Mario Galaxy 2, and justified it by saying that Austin and I play it together. The things we really want are huge. Does anyone want to get us a trip to Disneyworld? My car is getting old. Anyone want to buy us a new one? Other fun things that we’ve gotten in past years: tires for Robin’s car, tires for my car, money toward an iPad that wouldn’t be released until March.

You know what? The holidays used to be awesome. Parts of them still are, but parts of them are beyond idiotic. It’s like all of our hearts were in the right place, but then someone went to that place because that’s where the hearts were stored, and took them. Then that asswipe twisted our hearts and told us that nobody wants a heart as a gift. What they want is the George Foreman Grill, and you’re a jerk if you don’t buy it for them.

The problem is that it’s become about forced consumption. What we’ve been doing is essentially a con game wherein we all hoodwink each other into buying things for each other that none of us would normally bother to get for ourselves.

Example.

I don’t need a light for my Kindle. I don’t need Super Mario Galaxy 2. I don’t need The Dark Knight Rises on DVD. Sure, I’d like them and sure, I’ll take them, and sure, I’ll be pleased when I get them. But I don’t NEED them, and in a sane world, I wouldn’t buy a lot of those things because I actually have some impulse control. What our current arrangement does is to remove that impulse control by passing the impulse onto someone else.

Oh, hell, he MIGHT like that DVD? Well then I’M GOING TO BUY IT AND NOBODY ELSE TAKE THAT IDEA BECAUSE IT’S MINE!

And then I’ve got to reciprocate. Sure, I had some impulse control about my own stuff, but how can I not buy something for someone when they’re so selflessly indulging my most vague consumerist impulses for me?

A few years ago, I told Robin, “Let’s not exchange gifts.”

It’s stupid to do so just because everyone else is doing it. I mean, we share a fucking bank account. She’d be buying me something with my own money, and I’d be buying her something with her money. We’d do it because something has told us that we have to consume in preparation for one specific day, despite the fact that we get stuff for each other all the time. We’d end up with two things we wouldn’t otherwise have purchased, and be out the money for both. Why? Because someone convinced us that we’re bad, careless, mean people if we don’t?

And you know what? That conditioning worked. For a few years, we kept buying things for each other, despite the idiocy of feeling that one particular day was more worthy of gift-giving than any other.

But this year, we’re not exchanging gifts. I told her, “The things I actually want from you cost nothing.” I then told her that I’m getting something, but that she shouldn’t retaliate because my idea is kind of for both of us. Then I told her that it’s nothing sexual because she gets nervous when I say things like that.

My brother and sister and I figured this out a few years ago, too. We all have good jobs. We get together for the holidays and have fun times (EX: a Christmas tree ornament at my mom’s house called “Constipated Santa” — see image at the top of this post wherein C.S. says, “Ho-ho-ho-ly shit am I fucked up”), and we could never think of anything to buy each other that we’d actually use or want. So we ditched it. They buy for my kids, and when they have kids, we’ll buy for theirs.

I told Robin that my dad would totally be into this. She wasn’t sure. I told her that my dad is the most outside-the-nine-dots motherfucker you ever did see. Then I told him what I had in mind, that we not exchange gifts, and he said, “Oh, thank God.” Then he thanked me several times during the course of the phone call that followed.

We’re not minimalists. We buy for our kids, and others buy for our kids, and we buy for others, and others will buy for us. I appreciate the sentiment behind all of it, which is, “It’s the thought that counts,” but lately I’ve been wondering something: If it truly is the thought that counts, why do we have to spend a bunch of money to buy stuff?

I haven’t tried the quasi-minimalist approach with people who I don’t think would really feel it, but maybe I will next year.

Can we just get together? Can we just enjoy each others’ company? Can we spend less time in stores and online and more time de-stressing over some egg nog?

I bought one of my grandmothers chocolate and bought the other some nice coffee. It’s all they want. They keep saying, “Don’t buy me stuff!” They don’t want more things. They want attention. They want a phone call. They want a visit. It’s like I told Robin; the things most of us want more than anything really do cost nothing.

What’s pretty cool is that my kids are apparently catching the vibe. My son, who is 8, kept insisting that he wanted to buy me something. You know, his two dollars a week versus my slightly larger income, to buy something I’d routinely buy for myself. Want to buy new tires for the van, son? So I thanked him very much for the thought, but told him that if he really wanted to get me something, I’d like one of the things he makes himself. Because it’s the thought that counts… and what kind of gift comes with more thought?

I’m not judging on any of this. It’s just something that’s been on my mind.

If you want to do the whole Christmas consumerist shebang, then bless you; go out and do it. But as with anything, just know what it is that you’re doing. Are you buying that thing for Aunt Sally because she actually wants and needs it? Or are you buying it because something or someone told you that you had to or you’re a… what’s that green guy’s name again? Oh yeah…. you’re an Oscar.

Something to think about.

Happy holidays, y’all.

—

Last month, I wrote about how I took my book Fat Vampire from raw idea to publication in 29 days.

Then, last night, just four weeks later, I published the sequel: Fat Vampire 2: Tastes Like Chicken.

Now, maybe that seems impressive, finishing two big tasks in two small timeframes, but this isn’t about speed — and it’s certainly not about me trying to impress anyone. I’m not trying to break any records. What I’m trying to do — what I’ve finally done, after twelve years of creative stagnation — is to break through a bottleneck that frustrates a lot of writers.

In other words, maybe some of the stuff that helped get me unstuck can help you — regardless of how long you take to publish your book.

And so I figured I’d share fourteen tips that I’ve learned through trial and error and experimentation. Maybe you can take something from what I’ve learned and use it to create your own awesome thing.

Now, I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination… but I’m certainly getting better, and maybe you can take something useful from my experience.

Let’s find out.

Tip #1: Do the work

I’ve attributed this idea to Steven Pressfield over and over in the past, but let us not forget that the great sage Billy Crystal also said in the theatrical masterpiece Throw Momma From the Train, “A writer writes, always.”

It’s true. You’d never run into a welder who’s never actually welded anything, but you run into writers all the time who don’t write. So let’s get something out of the way that I would think should be obvious: you don’t get to call yourself a writer if you aren’t putting your ass into a chair on a regular basis and writing.

Stop treating it like it’s a delicate art. Sit. Write. Do the fucking work. End of story.

Tip #2: Write fast

I think it’s a mistake to agonize over every word in a rough draft. Getting words perfect is what second, third, and fourth drafts are for.

Stephen King says in On Writing (which every writer should read), “Writing fiction… can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self doubt.” I totally agree. You have to force yourself to get the story OUT in the first draft and to worry about making it better later on. If you write slowly, you’ll get mired in one place and will succumb to doubt and second-guessing.

I believe that writing a first draft is mostly a subconscious thing, and that your critical mind has no business butting in while your story is being formed.

Tip #3: Write thin, then fill in the details later

Feel free to ignore this tip (or any of them) because everyone is different, but I suggest writing the bare bones of your story first and then filling those bare bones in during subsequent drafts.

I used to write a TON during the first draft and then rely on rewrites to cut out the fluff, but I’ve found that this is a mistake. If I need 120k words in the end, I used to plan to write 150k words and cut out 30k. If I did that, it was hard to find the story in all that padding — like searching for a needle in a haystack. But if instead I write 100k words and then add a net 20k during rewrites (which might mean eliminating 20k of fluff and adding 40k of new clarifying/detail scenes), I find I can keep the story in focus.

Cluttered first drafts lose me while I’m writing and frustrate me when I’m editing. Think of it this way: In the first draft, your job is to tell yourself the story, and in the second draft, your job is to tell others the story. How much detail do YOU really need in order to understand the story enough to write a second draft?

Tip #4: Get over yourself

If you can’t produce anything, stop worrying so much about being Ernest Fucking Hemingway and just tell the story. When you try to be impressive and poignant and meaningful in a first draft, you usually end up looking like a pompous assbag and risk losing the story due to all of the hot air. See tip #2 above.

Tip #5: Understand that your voice is your voice — not somebody else’s

All writers read, and we can’t help but be influenced by what we read, so we tend to ape the styles we enjoy. You like Ray Bradbury? You’ll try to write like Ray. You like Michael Chabon? You’ll try to write like Michael. This stuff isn’t even conscious, but you’ll see it when you start wondering if you “should do” something stylistic or thematic. But the thing is, Michael doesn’t sound like Ray doesn’t sound like Chuck Palahniuk, so what does that tell you?

Good writers have unique voices, and you have to learn to trust yourself to find yours. So be careful which “writing rules” you obey.

Tip #6: Practice

Voice is just one of the things in writing that takes time to learn and to develop. A few of the others are pacing, the feel of dialogue, correct use of point-of-view, and how much to reveal at what times. The bad news is that there is no shortcut to learning those things, and that you have no choice but to keep writing (see tip #1) to clear the pipes until you begin to improve.

Check out this 2-minute video of Ira Glass talking about the creative process. It pretty much says it all:

Tip #7: Accept that you will probably despair and hate your work at some point in the process

Hugh Howey, blockbuster bestselling author of the Wool series, told us on the Self Publishing Podcast that he alternates liking and hating his stories as he takes them through different drafts. I was so glad to hear him say that, because I do the same. I’m very happy with the final versions of my books, but there were distinct times during editing all of them that I thought what I’d written was hopeless and terrible.

Push thorough this feeling. It’s destructive. First and even second drafts are allowed to be kind of ugly as long as the core of the story is there. And yes, what you’ve written may suck… but it’s equally likely that if you keep working and refining in spite of your doubts, you may find that you start liking it again.

(Note: This cycle may repeat. Don’t think you won’t hate it again eventually just because you liked it once.)

Tip #8: Tell the damn story

It’s amazing how tempting it can be to vanish into a character’s head or into an interesting scene and forget that the people in your story are supposed to actually be doing something. This was probably my biggest issue during my decade of lost production, wherein I constantly mistook situation for plot.

So for instance, Fat Vampire could have been about a guy who was turned into a vampire and finds himself forever physically unfit. That’s amusing, but it doesn’t go anywhere. The story had to move from A to Z. Reginald had to have a task or a quest, and he had to complete it or overcome it.

Think of it this way: There’s a famous story about how the movie Speed was pitched as “Die Hard on a bus” — but there are TWO elements to that statement. You can’t just have a Die Hard type of setup. That’s just a situation, or a setting. In order for the film to work, you need to have the plot, too — which is the action that occurs on the bus.

(P.S: This is true even if you aren’t writing novels with a lot of action. Jane Austen novels aren’t exactly a thrill a minute, but clearly something still HAPPENS in those books.)

Tip #9: Have faith that your story will find itself

I used to write without an outline (“pantsing,” so-called because you operate by the seat of your pants), and my podcast partners Sean and Dave do the opposite (“plotting” = working from an outline). I’ve learned that I work best somewhere in the middle. I create a few bullet points and have a decent idea where the story will end up, but I don’t write out every detail ahead of time. But regardless of whether you pants or plot, you will find that there will always be points at which the story will stray from your plans and begin to make itself. Your job is to let it.

I can think of three huge plot points in Fat Vampire 2 that I honestly didn’t know were coming… and the crazy thing is that those plot points were set up and foreshadowed in the first book, before I even knew there would be a sequel. This kind of thing will happen more and more as you write faster and learn to trust yourself.

Tip #10: Don’t overexplain

Most beginning writers explain things to death because they fear being misunderstood. I get it. I’ve been there. But consider this: another great Stephen King quote from On Writing goes like this: “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” What that means is that a little bit can go a long way.

When a character enters a room, you don’t need to go through a laundry list of exactly what the room looks like and how many coins are on the dresser. Describing a room simply as “cluttered” will often do the trick. And as a bonus, your fiction will feel more real because you’ve given the reader freedom to provide her own picture of a cluttered room, rather than imposing your vision onto her.

And the “story writing itself” stuff from #9 above? That happens when you give it room to happen. Don’t feel the need to explain every detail of how things work or why they happen in your story. Tell what’s relevant, and keep the rest to yourself.

I’m really glad I learned this one, because the ending of Fat Vampire 2 depends entirely on my decision NOT to include certain explanations in Fat Vampire. I didn’t know that at the time, though… and if I had overexplained my world in the first book, I’d have been screwed when I needed a solution at the end of the sequel.

Tip #11: Omit needless words

This one comes from Strunk and White and is the natural follow-up to tip #10. It says that if you can eliminate words and not lose any real meaning, do it. Most writers resist this, and their thinking goes like this: “Every brush stroke in my art is vital, because it is my art.”

Well, good for you, but your readers may disagree. Loose, flowery writing tends to feel bloated and sluggish to readers, and no matter how literary you feel you are, it’s true more often than not that tight prose will provide a better experience for readers. Your precious extraneous words don’t mean shit to them.

Omit needless words in sentences. Omit paragraphs you can do without.

It’s true that a lot of words that are technically unnecessary end up being part of your “voice”…. but a lot of them are just slowing your readers down, so err on the side of editing too much rather than not enough.

Tip #12: When you write, vanish from the world entirely

You can read all about this one in this post, in “Way #10.” You need to take your writing seriously if you expect to get anywhere. When you write, unplug the phone, close the door, and wear headphones if you’re able. Ignore the world. You’ll be back to it soon enough.

Tip #13: Use the right tools

If I had to write again using Microsoft Word, I’d knife myself in the eye. Do yourself a favor and download the Mac or PC version of Scrivener, the best writing software ever. (Go ahead and try it — you have nothing to lose because it gives you a free trial. And yeah, you bet your ass that’s an affiliate link. I want to marry Scrivener and have its children.)

Not only is Scrivener spectacular to use, but I consider it flat-out necessary for modern publishing to any format other than an inkjet printer. If you use Word or most other software to try and produce .mobi (Kindle) or .epub (everyone else) files, you’re begging for a strong compulsion to fork yourself in the eye. I painstakingly converted The Bialy Pimps from Word to Scrivener so that I could publish it without the internet blowing up. Don’t make the same mistake as I did.

Tip #14: Get the right support

Writing is lonely. You need reasons to believe in what you’re doing, and people to hang onto when your faith wavers, which it will. So find yourself a writers’ group — virtual or in-person — and meet regularly.

You also absolutely must subscribe to the Self Publishing Podcast (look for it on iTunes, Stitcher, and in other directories) so that you can regularly hear from guys who are making a living at this (Sean and Dave) and a guy who’s getting there (me). I find that I get inspired when I listen, and I’m one-third of the show. I guess I impress myself with my insights.

And if you want some real mind-supercharging and accountability, you might also consider joining my Everyday Legendary community. There’s a bunch of writers in there, and they form accountability groups in the forums. You’ll also be surrounding yourself with forward-thinking, possibility-oriented, optimistic people instead of downer assholes. So think about that, too.

Now, obviously some of the above tips may not fit with you, your personality, or the way you write. That’s cool. But seeing as it’s all stuff I’ve had to learn over time and have found useful, I figured it’d be jerky of me not to share it with you. Who knows; might help you come unstuck if you’re stuck, or get supercharged if you’re already rolling.

Use it well. Practice. And do the work.

(Oh, and pick up Fat Vampire and Fat Vampire 2. They’re both awesome. I should know. I wrote them.)

And again, that’s a very flattering question because it implies that not only did I do something amazing… but that I did something so amazing that it’s literally incomprehensible. Now, I know a rhetorical question when I see one, and most of the “How did you do that?”s I was getting were expressions of amazement, not actual inquiries.

If I let those questions hang in the breeze and simply accept the misguided implication that I’m in some way amazing, I’d be doing a pretty serious disservice to all of you. Remember, I’m the guy who wrote How To Be Legendary, which says, in part, that nobody doing anything that you think is amazing is any different or better than you are.

So no, a book in a month isn’t amazing — not when you break it down.

What follows are eleven ways to be stupidly effectively in anything you want to do. They work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

WAY #1: Accept that change is gradual

I’ll lead with this one because it’s the foundation of everything. If, right now, you think that writing and publishing a book in a month (or running a marathon, or raising ten kids, or making a million dollars, or anything else) sounds impossible, realize that it’s simply the culmination of many small steps over time.

You know how I’ve mentioned Everyday Legendary — the community I co-created with an awesome, amazing group of forward-thinking people? Its tagline is “A community dedicated to achieving the impossible by becoming more, every single day.” That means we believe in making tiny amounts of progress every day, over time, until what used to seem impossible is simply the logical next step. You want to earn that “impossible” million dollars in a new business? Earn one dollar first. Then earn another. Repeat.

WAY #2: Find peers whose accomplishments piss you off and make you feel totally inadequate

You know my “impressive” story about completing a book in less than a month? Well, Dave Wright and Sean Platt, my co-hosts on the Self Publishing Podcast, produce two books every week.

I was able to complete Fat Vampire so fast because every week, I was talking to these two writing machines/fuckers and they made me feel totally inadequate. They’d announce completion of season 3 of whatever and season 1 of something else one week, and they’d announce two deals with Amazon.com’s publishing arm (seriously) the next, and all the while, I had to keep saying, “Um… I still have The Bialy Pimps.” I felt like I had to keep up. My pitiful accomplishment of a single book wasn’t cutting it. They were making me feel totally lazy, and that pissed me off.

Obviously, use this strategy with caution. The idea is to inspire and motivate you, not to kick you in the stomach and leave you feeling terrible. Chuck D. said, “When I get mad, I put it down on a pad — give you something that you never had.” Meaning that when Chuck gets pissed, he doesn’t just stay pissed and get bummed out. Instead, he does something, which in Chuck’s case means that he writes lyrics. You should do the same.

WAY #3: Find or join a peer group or a community

Sean and Dave don’t just motivate me by chasing behind me with a shame stick. They also keep my head in the world of writing. I talk to these guys for an hour each week about the craft of writing and publishing, and I learn from them and they learn from me. The fact that Fat Vampire could simply be a novella of 38,000 words, for instance, came from them, as did the idea that writing fast is often a good way to blow through roadblocks — and that’s not even accounting for the fact that the three of us co-discovered the premise of “a fat vampire” in one of our discussions. And then after I started writing, they were cheering me on during our podcast sessions and whenever we emailed.

You deserve a group who does the same for you, who will hold you accountable to your goals and keep your head in the world that you want it to stay in. You can form a mastermind, find friends online, or join a community. (I’d like to be so bold at this point to suggest joining the Everyday Legendary community, which is filled with people who think this way and who form accountability groups in the forums.)

WAY #4: Set stupidly ambitious goals… and be okay with falling short of them

If you’ve played around with much personal development stuff, you may be familiar with the concept of a “stretch goal.” The idea is to set a goal that you think is beyond your capabilities. You “stretch” to reach that goal, and the idea is supposed to be that even if you fall short of that goal, you’ll be much further along than if you’d striven for a lesser goal and achieved it.

My current stretch goal is to publish Fat Vampire 2 by Halloween. It’s also to complete the first draft this week. Will I make it? Maybe, maybe not. But even if I miss the goal, I’ll be much further ahead of where I’d be if I’d said, “Oh, I’ll write the first draft by Halloween.” I’d definitely make that goal, but I’d rather miss my stretch goal, because that would probably mean I’ll have the draft in two weeks.

Just make sure you’re okay with missing these goals. Remember, “stretch and miss” is almost the expected and desired M.O here, so no getting down on yourself for any “failures.”

WAY #5: Use a calendar

Check out this screenshot of my Google calendar for two weeks ago:

Click to enlarge

I made this calendar before the week began, deciding how much I could jam in, at what time, and still feel comfortable.

I knew I wanted to edit Fat Vampire, but I also didn’t want to slack on the two other fiction projects I was working on. I knew I wanted to go to the gym three times and get in my off-day activity, which is either playing Dance Dance Revolution (I’m getting good, dammit) or walking on my treadmill. I knew I could multitask the latter because I have a treadmill desk in the basement (I’m writing this post while walking, by the way), but a lot of things required dedicated time, including an unfortunate doctor’s appointment and a time I’d booked for a massage therapist to cause me large amounts of pain.

By putting your work time on a calendar — not just appointments and phone calls, but also dedicated blocks of time for what you truly want to work on — you’ll find yourself keeping those appointments with yourself as reliably as you keep appointments with clients. Be respectful of those blocks of time, and don’t blow them off or move them any more than you’d blow off or move any other appointment.

Now, did I manage to follow that calendar exactly as written throughout the whole week? Of course not. That would have been ridiculous. What I actually did was to get up between 4 and 5am every morning and do what was on the schedule, but then also added the forum to the Everyday Legendary community and announce it to my internal and external lists, added in a few extra writing blocks, and talked to a partner for two hours about an upcoming project.

So yeah, this strategy works.

WAY #6: Get excited

Look… I didn’t get up so early and work so hard (35+ hours of fiction writing, which currently makes me no real money, on top of my usual workload) by forcing myself to do it. I did it because I was excited. It wasn’t a chore to get up early; I could barely sleep because I was so eager to get at it.

Find a project whose potential excites you, or whose doing entices you regardless of whatever may come out of it. Revisit Ways #2 and #3 above to further that excitement, and then get to scheduling that excitement on your calendar.

WAY #7: Schedule personal time

You may have noticed that not all of the blocks in the screenshot in Way #5 are exactly work-related. I mean, sure, the schedule looks jam-packed, but look at what it’s jam-packed with: Monday’s “B&N” is when I go to the gym and then spend the day at Barnes & Noble with my son Austin, reading about different stuff and drinking lattes from the cafe. Wednesday’s “Gym and Austin time” is similar, but it involves window shopping for toys at Target, Frisbee golf, and lunch at Chipotle. “DDR” is when I play Dance Dance Revolution. It rained on Friday, so I had to swap mini golf for more writing and a strategy call. We did mini-golf this week, on Monday.

The idea here is that you can only work so much, and you only should work so much, even doing stuff you love. Taking personal time ensures that you won’t burn out and will remain happy in your pursuits, and scheduling your fun stuff right there on your calendar along with your “important work” gives it the same importance as that work, as it should be. “Hey, can we discuss XYZ vital project today?” “No, boss… I’m playing mini golf with my kids today, sorry.” You get the idea.

WAY #8: Set specific work times and then jam the shit out of those times… but don’t work at other times

My schedule, no matter how packed, ends at 6pm every day and only covers Monday through Friday. That’s because I designate weekdays before six as my work times. So what do I do after six? I hang out with my family. What do I do on weekends? Nothing. Fucking nothing. Last weekend my family was away and I watched eight episodes of Breaking Bad and five movies, went for a long walk, and ate nachos and sushi (not together).

Now, my work times coincide roughly with the traditional workday because I don’t have a traditional job, but if you do, you might designate 6-8am or 8pm to midnight or Saturday all day for your extracurricular (I call them “Legendary”) pursuits. Pick specific times and then work the living hell out of those times, week after week. Don’t work other than during those times. If you find you absolutely must work outside of your designated blocks, adjust your schedule: create a new bona-fide block and work the hell out of that block too.

Work hard during your designated times — and only during those times — and you’ll find yourself realizing two things: 1) if you work hard during your scheduled times, you won’t feel like you have to work during your off times, and 2) if you aren’t allowed to work during your off times, you will work like a motherfucker during the times you’re supposed to be working… because otherwise you’ll accomplish nothing.

WAY #9: Go for walks

Notice how I said that I went for a walk last weekend? I do that whenever I can. Not only will it break up a stretch of hard work, but it’ll get you out and active as well as helping spawn ideas. I walk whenever I have a problem to solve. When I don’t have a problem to solve, sometimes ideas come anyway. The entire concept for the How To Be Legendary manifesto and the Everyday Legendary community came to me during a walk along Lake Erie this spring and was fleshed out during subsequent walks. I worked out the end of Fat Vampire on a walk and the entire concept of Fat Vampire 2 on a walk. (That’s what I was doing this past weekend, incidentally.)

My walks are long when I can afford the time — two hours isn’t uncommon if my schedule permits. I take my phone, which has a voice memo app on it, and record ideas as they come to me. I don’t talk on it, though; very few people ever call me, for which I’m grateful. As I walk, when I’m not recording intermittent good ideas, I talk out loud to myself. It’s a quirk I’ve used for forever when I want to work something out, and usually my routes are sparsely enough populated to allow me to do it. Apparently I just like to talk, even if nobody is listening.

WAY #10: Submerge yourself for long periods of time, and Ignore the world entirely until you come up for air

If you’ve scheduled a block of time to work on something that matters, don’t be a dumbass and have your phone right next to you. Turn the damn thing off. My work blocks rarely last longer than two and a half hours, and 90 minutes is more common and works well for a lot of people. And guess what? The world can wait for your ever-so-important input for 90 to 150 minutes. No empires will collapse if you don’t jump every time your phone rings. And for the love of God, turn off those stupid email notifications on your phone. Repeat after me: Email is an asynchronous medium. Feeling that you need to answer an email the instant it comes in is beyond stupid. Acting that way will kill your progress.

(SIDE RANT: I despise this idea we’ve all bought into over the past decade or two that goes something like this: I am so incredibly important that nobody can do without me for a few hours or make decisions on their own, so it’s vital that I be available at all times, including during off hours or on vacation, and that I respond instantly to any and all requests. Think about that for a second. What are you, a slave? When the world calls you, you’ve got to jump up and obey without hesitation, as if you’re afraid of the master’s whip? Listen: If nobody’s life is on the line and you still absolutely must answer emails and calls the instant they come in, then you should really stop reading this guide because there’s no hope for you anyway. You might as well get yourself one of those stupid servant hats and consider yourself the world’s bitch. Start answering your phone like this: “Yes, suh!”)

Answering the phone (or text, or IM, or Skype chat, or Google chat, or email) in an instant, stimulus-response manner teaches your brain that everyone else’s agenda is more important than your own. I don’t feel that way, and I suggest you don’t either. Be selfish about this. Here’s one of my credos: My life is my life, and what I choose to do with it is more important in the moment than whatever you need from me. I’ll help you if I can… when it’s time. With a few rare exceptions, I go first. You have to wait.

In addition to nixing the phone, I recommend totally and completely shutting out the world while you work. For me, this means that I close my office door when I’m writing, and my family knows not to come in or knock unless the house is on fire. Then, if you can do it, I highly — HIGHLY — recommend working while wearing a good pair of over-the-ear stereophonic headphones and listening to music. Now, not everyone can do this. I used to think I couldn’t write while listening to music, but I forced myself to learn how to do it, and it’s probably quadrupled the amount of stuff I can get done and has allowed me to work during times I’d previously thought were too distracting.

If you can’t work to music, that’s a bummer… but if you can, DO IT, and do it with headphones. Good ones, not earbuds. Here are the headphones I use. They’re not overly expensive, the sound quality is excellent, they’re extremely comfortable to wear, and they will shut out the world. I’ve always closed my door while working, but the thing was, I could still hear my family outside, my neighbor mowing his lawn, and the dogs barking. Now I don’t hear anything. My wife actually yells at me because sometimes I’ll forget to silence my phone and it’ll keep ringing over and over beside me, and I won’t even know.

I can and do listen to music with lyrics (Eminem is a favorite), but instrumental stuff like the Inception soundtrack works great too, and is far easier if lyrics distract you. But seriously… get the good headphones. I cheaped out for years and wore earbuds. It is not the same. You’re worth $90, so get a pair if you’re serious about what you do. They may just change the way you work. I know they did for me.

To sum up this incredibly long section, the way I recommend working is akin to scuba diving: You submerge for long periods of time, during which you are totally and completely inaccessible. In between those submersions, you come up, take off your headphones, open your door, and take a few minutes to reconnect with your surroundings. Then, if your schedule calls for it, you can suit back up and vanish again.

(By the way, I have rants on email in addition to the phone, and highly recommend you only check email a few times a day, during designated email-checking periods. I wrote two posts on this strategy here and here. I don’t follow my own advice perfectly all the time, but I hate myself a little whenever I fall off the checking-email-only-twice-a-day wagon.)

WAY #11: Go for “action” first and “perfect action” second

Saved the big-picture one for last. Most of the time, it’s more important that you do something than that you do something perfectly. I stole this concept from Tony Robbins, who simply calls it “massive action.” It’s what it sounds like: Do a lot of shit.

Stop worrying so much about writing that perfect sales letter or creating that perfect website and simply write the damn sales letter and create the damn website. In my case, I know I’m capable of writing fast and producing quality stuff, but I’d been using “artistry” as an excuse to fiddle with things for years, when really I should have just been writing.

Now, that said, don’t be a slob. You still need to produce good stuff. I wrote Fat Vampire in under a month, and that felt crazy-fast to me, but despite its rapid turnaround I think that it’s really, really good. (I’m biased, obviously, but I do think that.) I’m not suggesting that you focus solely on speed and action and going crazy and just churning out crap. But most people err on the side of perfection because it’s actually an excuse (if you insist on being perfect, which you can’t be, you’ll never have to ship your work and face criticism), so unless you know you tend toward being an actual, real, legit half-ass slob, don’t worry about it. Do first. You can always go back and correct any mistakes later.

So those are my eleven tips. You’ll see that there’s no magic here, just hard work. You want to do things that others will think are amazing? This is how you start.

Now go out and do shit (and check out Everyday Legendary if you want some community and accountability while you do).

That’s not the reason you should care about this post, though. The reason you should care — the reason you should be extremely excited if you’re any kind of a writer at all — is that the story behind Fat Vampire goes like this:

In four weeks, I took a brand-new,
bare-bones idea and turned it into a fully realized
title that is available for sale right now.

That kind of potential is so incredibly exciting for all writers. Today we can take our ideas and make them real in no time at all… but it didn’t used to be this way.

Let’s set the way-back machine for twelve years ago.

In the first part of 2000, I finished my first novel. As was the process before e-books, I then wrote letter after letter to literary agents, begging them to represent me. If they had been interested in me (they weren’t), I’d have, on signing, earned the privilege of waiting while my new agent tried to convince publishers to print my book. Then I’d go through a few rounds of edits, make some concessions I probably wouldn’t want to make, and then, maybe a year later, my book would be in stores and I’d start receiving a phat 7% of the purchase price as my royalty. This would then go on until Barnes & Noble decided I was a failure and stopped carrying my book, and thereafter it would only be available in obscure used book stores or out of my garage. The end.

(NOTE: The above only really had a chance after I wrote a ton of short stories and spent months or years begging obscure literary journals to publish those stories so that I could get some publication credits to impress the agents.)

But now, everything has changed. Today, writers are in charge. We say what ships. We say how it’s marketed. We control the speed. We control the access. This doesn’t mean that everything sells well, of course, but at least we can now fly or fail under our own power, rather than relying on a lucky break.

Today, we’re the ones who say what goes. Today, quality plus a solid and prolific work ethic plus patience nearly guarantees success on some level, after enough time. Today you can manufacture your own platform and your own fan base and your own profits.

Right now, just 29 days after the idea first surfaced, Fat Vampire is available on Amazon’s Kindle platform. Maybe people will like it and maybe they will hate it, but what matters is that it has a chance.

Head on over and check out Fat Vampire, and then realize that you can do the same thing.

Now before I get into the rest, a quick note: If you don’t care about publishing a book or the writing process, you can stop reading now.

But if you are interested, here’s a step-by-step process to getting your work published… in whatever time frame you decide is best for you.

STEP 1. Get an idea

Ideas are easy. They really are. If you don’t think you have any ideas, you just need more practice. Below is the story of my idea.

On September 4th, Dave Wright, Sean Platt, and I recorded episode 6 of our Better Off Undead podcast. It was titled “Horror Movies That Fucked Us Up Good,” and was, ostensibly, about movies that ruined things for us, like how Jaws ruined going to the beach.

However, if you’ve ever listened to Better Off Undead (and you should; the antics make me cry with laughter every single time), you might know that we’re never on topic. So in a not-at-all-rare diversion, we started talking about whether or not we’d choose to become vampires. Then this happened:

Dave: I would so do it.

Me: Can you imagine Dave as a vampire?

Now, you’d have to be familiar with our dynamic to truly get why this is funny, but let me elaborate a bit for any non-listeners: Dave is our resident curmudgeon, skeptic, and… by his own words… fat guy. Dave’s always making jokes about his weight.

Anyway, a bit later, this exchanged happened:

Me: I have a P.S. to this question, then. Let’s say you like this deal. Do you get in shape first?

Sean: Yes.

Dave (laughing): I’m going to be a fat vampire.

Me: You’d be like, “I could get into shape” and then immediately be like, “C’mooon, I’m fucking hungry! Come on, somebody turn me, fast!”

Sean: If I’m taking this deal, I need 90 days.

Dave: Are you assuming that you would be stuck in the same-shaped body? Like you couldn’t get in shape if you were a vampire?

Me: I think you’d heal to whatever you were.

That bit right there — the notion of “healing,” in a vampire sense, to whatever your body was like at the time of being turned — was the spark.

Dave then started saying he, as a “fat vampire,” would try to chase people and Sean said he wouldn’t catch them and would find himself starving to death, exhausted and twitching in the sun. We were soon laughing our asses off at Dave’s imagined predicament, wondering if the same thing held for tattoos and other physical attributes in place at the time of a vampire-related change. Would you be stuck with that bad tramp stamp on your ass forever?

Then I said: “I think there’s a story we need to do, about a fat vampire who can’t get any satisfaction.”

And boom goes the dynamite.

STEP 2. Turn that idea into a story with a plot

Contrary to what a lot of beginning writers think — and contrary to what I thought up until a few months ago despite successfully finishing a book — an idea is not a story. What I got during our podcast recording was just a concept, not a story.

I mean, think about it. I couldn’t just write about the existence of an overweight vampire. What would he do? He’d have to do something, right? I’d need an adventure to follow him along on. Every decent story has something that happens in it that moves the plot from A to Z, right? So simple, yet so easy to overlook.

Before I did anything, though, I set the frame in my mind. I thought the concept was hilarious, but I didn’t want it to be offensive. I’m an in-shape guy, and it could come across as hateful if I wasn’t careful. I knew I wanted my vampire (his name is Reginald) to be a hero. I wanted him to find something redeeming in himself that made up for his lack of physical prowess, and so I started to come up with a few sort of “ugly duckling becomes a swan” ideas.

I even called a friend of mine who is overweight (not Dave — he’s too damn cynical to be trusted) and asked her if the idea of “a book called ‘Fat Vampire'” would bother her. I explained the concept and some of the things that I though might happen. She told me that if I, as the narrator, wasn’t judgmental of Reginald and if his story was a good one where he came out on top, then the foibles along the way that I described (Reginald failing to outrun prey, for example) wouldn’t bother her. It wasn’t a guarantee, of course, but it was the best barometer I had.

What I ended up with, plotwise, was a twist wherein the vampire society is regulated and oppressive about procreation, making Reginald and anyone like him an outcast for being “imperfect.”

Once I realized that the plot would involve Reginald needing to face an ordeal — a trial, essentially — conducted by a totalitarian ruling group, I found that I could get the reader to root for Reginald rather than mocking him. His cause became a righteous one, touching on ideas of fighting judgment and oppression.

STEP 3. Write a first draft. Fast, if you can.

I won’t tell anyone how to write, but I’ll tell you my process in case it helps.

I screamed through the first draft of my manuscript in eleven days. That’s kind of crazy, especially considering I was still putting in around 2500 words a day on a separate fiction project about zombies.

But there were good reasons I was able to manage such good production.The main thing working in my favor was the fact that I’d chosen a shorter, novella-length format and therefore knew I had to keep things moving. The finished manuscript is around 38,000 words, which is about a third of the length of The Bialy Pimps. That didn’t leave much room for the meandering and soul-searching I usually put into my fiction, which turned out to be a good thing.

So, given the shorter length, when I thought about dawdling and taking the story out on a limb, I knew I had to force myself to stay on task. I was able to think in terms of “this happened, then this happened, and then this happened.” I did that until I was done. The short length called for a brisk pace, and the brisk pace kept me focused.

I think that briskness of pace — both in the story and in the actual writing — is huge.

If I eliminate all distractions (I close my door when I write and wear stereophonic, around-the-ear headphones), I can write around 1750 words an hour. Your speed may vary, but I highly recommend that during the first draft, you move as fast as you can rather than thinking too much about what you’re doing. You have to outrun your doubts. You have to outrun your desire to get each passage perfect and refine and reread and tweak as you go.

Just tell the fucking story. Keep the ball moving.

Writing fast and writing often will help you stay excited about the story — and if you confine your story to a shorter length than you’re used to, you’ll learn to eliminate the bullshit that slows you down and just get the “what happens” written. If you’re excited, you’ll want to write more. Hugh Howey, whose self-published bestsellers in the Wool series earn him tens of thousands of dollars each month, told us that if you experience writer’s block, you need to write something different and find what excites you. It’s that drive to stay up working until 2am that fires great stories.

I’ve also started setting a timer when I begin. I set it to whatever time I have (2 hour blocks at most, for me). When it goes off, I stop dead in my tracks. I’ll finish the word I’m writing, but not the scene, the paragraph, or even the sentence. I resist the urge to give myself closure, because having unfinished business ensures I’ll be eager to sit back down next time and close the loop. The first sentence in each session is the hardest, so I do whatever I can to get the ball rolling.

(Side note: I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend you pick up Scrivener if you’re a writer of any kind. It is so much better than anything I’ve tried, including and especially Microsoft Word. If you’d like to hear why, check out our interview with Gwen Hernandez, the author of Scrivener For Dummies. I simply can’t imagine using anything but Scrivener today.)

(ANOTHER NOTE: Scrivener also has a PC version. You can get it here.)

STEP 4. Rewrite

Anyone who listens to the Self Publishing Podcast knows that Sean, Dave, and I regard Stephen King’s On Writing to be a writers’ bible of sorts, so it may be no surprise that I follow King’s process on rewriting, which happens to consist of two drafts and a polish.

First, I let the rough draft sit for a while and don’t touch it. The idea is to give yourself some mental distance and allow you to see the story a bit more objectively. King recommends six weeks for novels, but I wanted to be able to publish this one in a month… and besides, it was shorter than a novel. So I let it sit for a week. (In the future, I’ll let novellas sit for a while longer, but even a week seemed to work okay.)

After that period of letting the story rest, I read it all in one sitting. I noted obvious typos but tried not to change anything larger than misspellings and punctuation errors. Instead, I kept reading and made notes about sections that seemed amiss, inconsistencies I needed to check on or fix, and so on. Big-picture stuff.

After that first read, I rewrote the novella — a process that kind of blends with the less-frightening concept of “editing.”

What I do is this: after I fix the obvious stuff I note while reading, I read it the whole thing again, but this time right inside of Scrivener. As I do, I fix stuff as I go. I do this in a back-and-forth fashion. I start at the beginning of a chapter, read until I find something that doesn’t flow completely right, and then change it until it does. Then I’ll go back and start from the beginning and read it again to see if it works. If it does, I keep reading until something stops me again. I fix that new thing, and then I go back a few sentences. I inchworm through the manuscript like that, fixing and going back a little and reading and fixing, until I reach the end.

If there are big-scope questions at this point (I had two: I was inconsistent about the time of year (and hence the weather) and also about the timeframe during which the story unfolds), I make note of them for my final re-read.

Once that’s done, I read it straight through again without stopping. (I actually make a .mobi file (Kindle’s format) and put it on my iPad for this second read so that I can get the experience the reader will have.)

(Scrivener makes outputting Kindle and ePub files, as well as PDFs and other formats, extremely easy. This is NOT easy using other writing software — including and especially Microsoft Word, which I used to use and now want to punch in the balls whenever I use it. This is another huge reason I recommend Scrivener, which you can get here. And yes, that’s an affiliate link; I fucking love that program.)

On the second straight-through read, I make any remaining notes to fix during my polish — mostly minor stuff by now. I also note areas that don’t totally “flow.” This is a hard concept to describe, but I think you learn it with practice. I get a feel for when something is right versus when it’ll stop readers and/or bog them down, so I note those latter places as I find them.

During the final polish, I fix the poor-flow sections and make the nitpicky proofreading edits. Then I’ll re-read the larger sections I rewrote, fix any inconsistencies I noted, and eventually output a final .mobi file for upload to Amazon.

So by the time I output my final, I’ve typically read the entire thing through four times.

STEP 5. Send to an editor and/or beta readers (Optional but recommended, even though I’m a hypocrite)

Sean and Dave, on the Self Publishing Podcast, make the sign of the cross whenever I admit that I don’t have an editor review my stuff. This is a quirk unique to me — not because I’m too good for it, but because it’s just not part of my process, for better or for worse.

Most people really should have other, objective eyes on their work. A paid editor is usually the best bet.

I do normally have people read my stuff before it goes live, though. I know a few good folks who catch errors and inconsistencies (big and small) that I miss. I trust these people to give me their opinions. These opinions are not unbiased, but I don’t care. I write for people like them, and I don’t care what people too far outside of my sweet spot think. This is an “ideal reader” thing for me. It’s a “proudly alienate the people who aren’t right for you” thing.

So for instance, someone rated The Bialy Pimps poorly and said that the characters were shallow and hateful.

Yeah, they are. Next?

I guess what I’m saying is that there will always be people for whom your story will be a bad fit, and anyone who thinks that what my Pimps characters do is to be scorned instead of laughed at is in that group. So yes, I want biased opinions. I want to know what my ideal readers think, not what everyone might think.

STEP 6. Make a cover and write a description

The cover of Fat Vampire, which I think turned out really damn cool, was a collaboration between me and my friend Chachi. We went back and forth, each working it out and adding stuff.

Now, a caveat here: You’re either going to know enough about design to try to make your own cover or you’ll hire someone. I can’t explain Photoshop here. So, you know… just use your head.

But that said, the most important things to keep in mind about covers are:

1. The cover is probably going to be the most important piece of marketing your book has. If the cover doesn’t grab people, you’re going to have a hard time.
2. Covers should consist of symbols, and extraneous elements should be eliminated. In other words, you only have a few seconds to convey what your book is about and to tell readers why they should care. Potential buyers won’t read your description first, so your cover has to say all of that for you if you’re to have a chance.

In my case, I have a funny-but-also-horror story about an overweight vampire, so the elements I ended up with were:

For the “vampire” half of the equation:

1. Fangs
2. Blood

For the “fat” half:

3. Fried chicken

Those three symbols convey the book’s concept and tone, so we had to make those symbols jump out while muting everything else. We made the chicken browner and darker and gave it a high and crunchy-looking level of contrast. We made the fangs whiter and more obvious. We made the blood stupidly, cartoonishly red. (Chachi actually gave me realistic blood at the beginning, but I told him to give me redder, glossier blood, and to give me more of it.) Then we toned down everything else so that it faded into the background.

The last bit was to get the author and title in there without breaking the tone, so I mocked up the fast food receipt in the corner and am all proud of myself because I think it kicks ass.

Next, you’ve got to write a punchy description. Same drill as with the cover: hit the key elements and don’t wander.

Here’s my Amazon description for Fat Vampire:

From the author of “The Bialy Pimps” comes a story of fangs and fast food…

When overweight treadmill salesman Reginald Baskin finally meets a co-worker who doesn’t make fun of him, it’s just his own bad luck that tech guy Maurice turns out to be a thousand-year-old vampire.

And when Maurice turns Reginald to save his life, it’s just Reginald’s own further bad luck that he wakes up to discover he’s become the slowest, weakest, most out-of-shape vampire ever born, doomed to “heal” to his corpulent self for all of eternity.

As Reginald struggles with the downsides of being a fat vampire — too slow to catch people to feed on, mocked by those he tries to glamour, assaulted by his intended prey and left for undead — he discovers in himself rare powers that few vampires have… and just in time too, because the Vampire Council might just want his head for being an inferior representative of their race.

Fat Vampire is the story of an unlikely hero who, after having an imperfect eternity shoved into his grease-stained hands, must learn to turn the afterlife’s lemons into tasty lemon danishes.

The description is, in most cases, your second most important marketing tool. Your cover grabs potential readers, and after it does, the description gets them to give you a shot.

STEP 7. Publish

This part is the easiest if you know the process and the most intimidating if you’ve never done it before. (And if you want to know a shit-ton about this stuff, you should subscribe to our Self Publishing Podcast.)

Basically, you’ll go and get an account at Amazon’s KDP self-publishing dashboard and will click a button to publish a new title. That will take you to a screen where you can upload the .mobi file you output from Scrivener (or a Word file, if you enjoy discovering shitty formatting inconsistencies for months afterward) and your cover image. You’ll also choose up to two categories for your book, designate an author, pick some keywords, and paste in your description.

Then you’ll go on to the next page and set the price. For me, this is $2.99 for shorter works like Fat Vampire and $4.99 for full-length novels. Based on what we’re seeing, those seem to be near standards, though a lot of people push even longer works down to $2.99, which is the lowest price at which you’ll get a 70% commission on sales. (Below $2.99, you’ll only get 35%.)

The only real thing to decide beyond that is whether or not to enroll in Amazon’s KDP Select, which is a program that allows you to offer free promotions on your books in exchange for offering Amazon exclusivity. There’s a ton to this issue and you can get more info on it here and here, but the short version is that after much thought and research, I truly believe in KDP Select for people with multiple titles — especially if those titles are part of the same series. (This works very well because giving one book in a series away for free usually drives purchases of the non-free books in the series).

For people with just one book? Not so much.

Idea to publication in 29 FUCKING DAYS

What I described above is a lot of work, but the point is that it can be done. You don’t need to do it in a month, but I did it just prove to myself that there’s no magic. There’s hard work, and practice, and acuity, and patience. This is the Legendary formula in action, and if anyone is reading this from Everyday Legendary, I hope you get that, and that I see you apply it.

Work + persistence = results. That didn’t always used to be true in the world of writing — and especially fiction writing — but it is today, thanks to indie e-publishing.

I mean, think about it. Four weeks ago, the idea for Fat Vampire didn’t exist, and today the actual finished title is available for purchase.

Bring it on, writers. The power is now in our hands.

I’m apparently the only person to call him “Charlie.” To just about everyone else, he’s “Chachi,” as in “Joanie Loves.” That means his relatives call him that, his old friends call him that… and all the people who know him as an artist call him that. But we’ll come back to the artist thing in a minute.

Back in 2000, when I was 24, when I was fresh out of a gig working in a lab that I hated and that was giving me panic attacks, I got an hourly job as a barista in a Borders bookstore cafe, and Charlie was one of my co-workers. He knew me when I was a mess, when I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do with my life, when I was broke. He knew me before I was Johnny B. Truant, after I’d written a novel and consigned it to my closet, having given up on it.

So when I ran into Charlie a while ago in a Toys R Us with one of his kids and he told me how he was still working that job he didn’t really like (but that paid the bills) and was killing time after work in the garage drinking beer and thinking about all of the projects — art, writing, music, you name it — that he wished he was pursuing with his time, I realized that shit had just gotten real.

See, I just released a manifesto called How To Be Legendary that’s all about becoming your maximally fulfilled self.

I just launched a community called Everyday Legendary, in which I teach lessons and guide discussions about becoming “Legendary” in various ways… and in which the amazing, motivated members hold each other accountable to the high standards they all hold for themselves and for each other.

It’s fair to say I’ve devoted this phase of my life — and this phase of my business — to nudging as many people to GET OFF THEIR ASSES, STOP BEING COMPLACENT, STOP SETTLING, AND LIVE as possible.

And that may be fine for Johnny B. online. But what about the less loud, less forceful person I am every day with my wife, my kids, my mother, and the people who have known me forever?

Well, there was a bit of a disconnect there. Let me explain.

Put up or shut up

I wrote How To Be Legendary for Charlie.

Not just Charlie, of course, but he was one of the main people I was thinking of when I was writing it. Dude is talented. Talented. He makes amazing art. He can do things with a computer in an hour, for the hell of it, that few people can do with hours and hours and hours. He can sculpt and paint and shape custom figures for games or from pop culture that people clamor for, that people would die for the opportunity to pay him for.

And yet he’s done nothing with all of this talent. NOTHING. (I’m not calling him out, by the way. We’ve discussed this.)

His brother is in a successful Irish punk band. Charlie has similar aspirations, yet sits down after work and watches TV. He’s got a children’s book that he’s been told to submit by legit decision-making folks in the publishing industry. People beg him for prints of his art. They beg him to sell the figures he makes, because they’re collector junkies and he does amazing work. Charlie sits at work and dreams, then does nothing at all with them.

Now here’s something to consider: Charlie might be you.

When I wrote How To Be Legendary, my ideal reader was Charlie… but also, it really wasn’t. Really it was written for people like Charlie because I made the horrible and unfair mistake of believing that I couldn’t affect positive change in the real Charlie — or in any of the people right around me “in my real life.”

I’d hoped I could motivate a few people out there who I didn’t yet have a personal relationship with — people who hadn’t known me when I was on the wrong path, when I’d just quit the only job I’d ever thought I might do for a living, when I was dirt broke and an inch away from panic at all times. But the people who knew me “for real”? Who was I, to them, to write a manifesto? Who did I think I was, if I expected them to take my advice?

I was a hypocrite, I guess.

Maybe you can relate. I’m not calling you a hypocrite, but I will say that I’ve known a lot of people who have great advice for others… but who can’t take their own advice. It’s as if we think we know what’s best for the people around us, but that advice somehow isn’t good enough for ourselves. Which is why we stay stuck.

When I say that Charlie might be you, I mean that you might have talents or aspirations that you know you could do something with… but you just don’t. And maybe that bugs you, like it bugged Charlie when he recognized himself in someone else I wrote about.

When I published a post a few weeks ago about another friend of mine (“Bill”) who’s a lot like Charlie, I got a message on my Facebook wall from Charlie that said, “Awesome. Now I want to eat a bullet.” He saw Bill’s conundrum and saw that it was a lot like his. And because I hadn’t revealed the punchline — the manifesto — yet, it kind of stopped there. The realization left him bummed out: conscious of what was going on, but powerless to do anything to change it.

Not that he meant that he literally wanted to eat a bullet (I did hop on that right away; give me that much credit), but I’d still moved someone close to me in the opposite direction than I’d wanted to move him.

And that meant that it was game on.

Chachi gets Legendary

I collected my balls and, with less actual confidence than I was trying to convey, told Charlie to read How To Be Legendary when it was released. I then closed the metaphorical door on that problem as best I could, feeling sure that someone who’d known me forever would of course not take my BIG BRAZEN MANIFESTO seriously and would keep on being depressed and desperate. But hey, I’d tried, and you can’t make a horse drink after you’d led it to water.

But the day after I released How To Be Legendary, I got another Facebook wall message saying that Charlie figured what the hell and had downloaded it. Then he asked a question, but before I could answer it, he was writing that he was halfway through the thing, reading it instead of working. Then, while I’m watching my son’s soccer practice that evening, my phone rings and it’s Charlie, and he’s… positive. Inspired.

Inspiration can be like a hot bath — pleasant, but then it dissipates and you’re cold again. But it was a start, so I did my best to keep it going. I set up a time to hang out.

We had coffee yesterday at the local Panera, and I made him an offer: Put up or shut up. He was already doing all this art, taking pictures of it with his phone, and posting it to Facebook. So I told him that if he bought a domain name, I’d have my assistant set up a blog for him and that I’d commit him publicly to using that blog by writing the post you’re currently reading.

Now, let’s ask some questions. Let’s get real.

Does my offer of a blog and a public commitment to use it get Chachi, the artist, out of the job that I know my buddy Charlie, the 3-D designer, would really rather not be working? No. Does it get him a nice side income? No, not yet, and maybe not ever. Does it get him fame and fortune? Nope.

But does it get him taking JUST ONE STEP in the right direction? Absolutely.

It’s just a beginning, and the game is still very much his to win or lose. I’m not so naive as to believe that this is now SOLVED and Charlie is inevitably on the way toward something great. He might fall off the wagon. His various ventures might hit serious setbacks. He might work that job for years while trying to extricate himself.

But it’s a step, and you can’t get anywhere until you take those first (or those “next”) steps. You have to keep taking those steps, and you have to stay inspired. You have to keep believing… or, if you’re a Journey fan, to “Don’t Stop Believing,” which is essentially the same thing.

So, to handle that last part and to try and keep him in the “Legendary” mindset, I also comped him a membership to Everyday Legendary. He’ll get in there and interact with all of the rest of us who are trying to be Legendary. He’ll stay in the possibility mindset, which will hopefully allow him to take the next step, and the next, and the next.

Associating with positive people who are on the same “awesome-making” path you are has a remarkable way of keeping you on that path. You need a reason to believe, and hopefully his involvement in the community will help with that.

So, yeah. Chachi… committed to stepping into his role as artist, here, in front of all of you.

Say hello to my little friend

(That’s a Scarface reference because Charlie is Cuban and I know he’ll appreciate it.)

If this story uplifts you a bit and if you’re feeling rah-rah for a dude who might finally be on the path toward his true talent and purpose, go over to his Facebook page and drop him an “attaboy” or something similarly positive.

AND, in the coming weeks, watch chachiclausing.com (which we know goes nowhere as of the day this post is published) and kick his ass if you continue to see nothing there, or if he slacks off. (UPDATE: ChachiClausing.com is now live and he’s implementing like a motherfucker!)

We’re all in this together, people.

Let’s keep nudging each other away from complacency, and toward our intended awesomeness.

(By the way, if you’d like to be “all in this together” with what’s become an amazing group of forward-and-upward-focused people, join us in the Everyday Legendary community. It’s stupidly cheap as far as “things that make you actually do the shit you should be doing” are concerned.)

Now, as the guy who wrote the no-bullshit (and free) manifesto How To Be Legendary and launched the amazing Everyday Legendary community — this troubled me me.

After all, my most popular post, “The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You“, has got to be on the “inspiration and motivation” continuum. Just about the only other things it could be are philosophy or entrepreneurship — and let’s be honest; it’s not really philosophy and it’s not really entrepreneurship. The intention of that post was to inspire people to do the things that mattered to them and to motivate them to do it by pointing out that the clock was ticking.

And that’s almost 5000 Facebook shares worth of motivation. Fuck me.

And then, when I thought about it, I realized the same could be said of “Disobey.” That one is supposed to inspire readers to stop listening to authority for the sake of authority and to live their own lives. Or “You Are Dying, and Your World Is a Lie,” which which I hoped to motivate readers to stop worrying so damn much about being comfortable, and to worry more about actually being satisfied with how they were spending their lives.

So yeah, this might be a problem for me, because some people feel that “head stuff” and “heart stuff” and anything that lacks step-by-step instructions is just so much airy-fairy bullshit.

But what I say — and this is what I told my curmudgeon buddy — is that we’re living in an age where we’ve got more step-by-step, nuts-and-bolts, here’s-exactly-how-to-do-it-and-look!-there’s-a-YouTube-video-and-three-vaguely-related-porn-forums-about-it! information than we’ve ever had before, and we can get at that information instantly, wherever we happen to be.

And yet, we’re still not doing anything right. Most people still spend way more time doing things they’d rather not be doing than doing things they enjoy, and most people still never reach any of their goals — not the big, important ones, anyway. Why is that?

It’s because information is not the problem. The problem is in our minds.

You are in your own damn way

I recently hired a personal trainer named Roger Lawson. I did this despite the fact that I’ve been a reasonably hardcore gym rat for almost twenty years. I hired him despite having read dozens of books from the best minds in fitness and having run a weight training forum for several years. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours thinking about the best ways to eat, the best ways to train, sharing articles with like-minded people, trying new things, and, frankly, working my ass off. I’ve even got a manly injury — a broken arm from when I caught an Olympic clean wrong and snapped one of the bones (I forget which) in my left forearm.

What I’m trying to say is, I know a lot about this stuff. Yet I couldn’t quite get the six-pack of late night TV fame, so I hired Roger.

Roger told me that I needed to lose fat. To make that happen, he told me to eat less and exercise more.

Stop and think about that. He told me to eat less and exercise more. And sure, there were a lot of details in there, but the details weren’t what made the big difference. Hell, I even tried to make some justifications once about said details. When I did this, Roger slapped me back to reality by saying, “Everything is slave to the calorie deficit,” which meant, “Stop overcomplicating it, asshole, and worry about burning more than you consume.” Roger is pretty humble about such things. I mean, look at the message on his About page. Everything is reduced to simplicity. But the man earns his stripes, because he knows what he knows and he’s unflinching in getting others to do the things that they know.

Today, I’ve lost around 22 pounds. I’d like to go another eight or so, and if I may be totally and obnoxiously immodest, I think I look pretty damn ripped.

So let me ask you something: If the difference-maker was something as simple as eat less and exercise more — and if it was something I already knew and that we all know — then why did I get results this time despite many, many false starts in the past?

I think it was two things.

For one, I’d fooled myself into believing I simply didn’t have that much to lose. I’d convinced myself that I was already quite lean and that if I went below 190 (I’m at 181 now), I’d have no fat on me at all and that would be unhealthy. Roger and a camera changed my mind and taught me to believe something different.

And two, I didn’t have someone on my ass, telling me to get out of my own way and simply do what I already knew.

In other words, I needed someone to motivate me. I needed someone who — through his own results and those of his clients — would inspire me. I needed someone who believed so strongly in what he was telling me that I wouldn’t be able to doubt myself, ever, because he wasn’t going to give me enough slack to do it.

What Roger gave me — and continues to give me — is confidence in what I already knew. What Roger gave me was belief.

Now, I’m no rocket scientist here. You tell me if that means “head stuff” matters or not.

The four-minute mile

I just realized that what follows is a story about another Roger. How interesting.

Anyway, you may know the story of the four-minute mile. Basically, for centuries, throughout all of recorded history, nobody could seem to run a mile in less than four minutes. They tried and tried and tried, and had lions chase people to get them moving faster and whatever else, but, after enough time and enough failure, humanity decided that a person simply couldn’t run that fast.

Then a man named Roger Bannister did it. I won’t take you through how he did it, but he ran a mile in under four minutes, and everything changed.

After Roger did it, a lot of other people started to do it, too. Today it’s not even a very big deal to break the four-minute mark, and new records are being set all the time.

Think about that.

Suddenly, everyone’s able to do something that for centuries was considered impossible. So what changed? Did humanity read a great blog post about the mechanics of foot turnover and body position and pacing? Did someone release a new running book that made the difference? Did anyone release a how-to info product on improving stride length?

Nope. What made the difference was that one man finally did it. One man showed that it was possible, and that meant that suddenly, overnight, the minds of millions of people were changed. And when their minds were changed, people were suddenly able to do something very simple — to run faster. To step more quickly. The answer, it seemed, was obvious. How do you run faster? You run faster.

In the end, it was simple — just like everything you could ever want is simple.

Everything is simple

I’m going to tell you how to create a successful business. Ready? Here we go:

Sell something people want at a good price.

But what about getting customers, you’re asking? Okay:

Seek out people who might like what you’re selling, and tell them about it.

See? These things are very simple. And yeah, there are nuances, and I’ve taught those nuances in courses of my own. But the nuances — including the “how” — are refinements on a central theme that is missed surprisingly often. You’d be amazed how many people want to “start an internet business” but haven’t given any real thought to what they want to sell, if anyone would buy it, and where those people are.

Let’s do another. What about something a lot of people struggle with, like quitting smoking? Okay:

Don’t smoke.

The feedback system for this one is simple. If there’s a cigarette in your hand, you’ve done it wrong. Put it down and try again. (If you substitute “drinking” for “smoking” and “alcohol” for “a cigarette,” this is how you quit drinking, by the way.)

Want to have a better relationship with your teenager? Talk to him or her.

Want to get strong enough to lift twice your body weight? Lift weights, then make those weights heavier as you’re able.

Want to learn to dance? Practice dance steps until you get them right.

And if you’re red in the face right now, angry with me, screaming your objections, saying that there’s a lot more to it, that it’s haaaaaard to “just eat less” and it’s haaaaaard to “just not smoke” and it’s really, really haaaaaard to refine your product and your marketing and to get enough people to buy what you’re selling, then just calm down.

Yes. All of those things are hard. I agree. They’re very, very hard.

But I didn’t say they were easy. I said they were simple.

The latter is about knowledge. The first is about your mind. And this, my friends, is why “mind stuff” is important for all of us, all the damn time.

We’ve got the knowledge. What we lack is the drive, the belief, and a compelling reason to use what we already know… and to keep using it through a lot of hard work and pain, riding out the rough times in anticipation of better times ahead, until we get what we want.

Knowledge is not the problem

I’m so fucking tired of everyone blaming failures on lack of knowledge. Are there cases where you can fail because you didn’t know something? Of course. Are those things the norm? Absolutely not.

Let me tell you something, and I hope this doesn’t surprise anyone:

Nobody fails to quit smoking because of a lack of knowledge.

There is no factual knowledge that is lacking when someone tries to quit and doesn’t make it. “Hey, John, did you know that you should remove that cigarette from your mouth?” has never, ever been the piece of information that has made the difference for a struggling smoker. Same for the combos of drinkers/alcohol and people who want to lose weight/cake/sitting motionlessly. Nobody has ever seen a late-night infomercial, bought a weight-loss product, opened it up, and found only a slip of paper that says, “Eat less and move more” and had a light bulb go on over their head, saying, “Of course! I didn’t know this!”

When these things change, they change because someone finds something in their motivation, their belief, that allows them to get through the hard. Sometimes that’s a support group. Sometimes it’s finding a kind of Roger Bannister — a role model who has done what they want to do and proves that it’s possible. Sometimes it’s simply hearing the right words, in the right way, at the right time. Sometimes it’s hearing that the universe doesn’t give a flying fuck about the huge failure you think you’re going to have, and so you decide that it’s now or never, and it’s up to you.

Nobody likes to hear this, though. It’s so much easier to simply buy an easy button.

In fact, here. Let me give you a pitch for my new product:

For only $997, you can bust your ass for five years, failing constantly and exposing yourself to ridicule, banging your head against the wall and feeling like you’re getting nowhere. In this miracle product, You’ll drag your ass out of bed and show up each and every motherfucking day and put in really hard work until you feel like you’re at your breaking point, possibly crying and panicking. And then, after one hell of a lot of drudgery, you’ll finally see a tiny amount of progress, and then you’ll maybe have another setback and will want to quit. But if you push through the suck, it’ll get better — and one day, some day, you’ll succeed and get that thing you’ve always wanted.

Who wants to sign up? Here’s a PayPal button.

No? Okay, well then how about the same thing, but I’ll give it to you for free?

What? Why not? Look at that last bit, about succeeding and getting what you’ve always wanted? YOU CAN HAVE WHAT YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED! It’s a surefire thing, too. I can guarantee it if you’d like. All of your money back if you’re not completely successful after years of effort, at my discretion as to whether you actually worked hard or not.

In much, much less severe terms and a shorter timespan, this is what Roger sold me, by the way. I got to deprive myself and bust my ass, and he got to hold me accountable and tell me when I wasn’t actually working hard enough.

Yes, getting what you want is hard. I agree.

But the difference between people who succeed in getting the things they want and people who don’t is that the successes would take that deal every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Stop searching for the magic key and do the fucking work

Like I said, I wrote what I hope is an awesome (and free!) manifesto called How To Be Legendary: A Realistic Guide To Being the Superhuman You’re Supposed To Be, and if you agree with what you’ve just read, you should pick it up and spend some time studying it.

I want to save you some time right now, though. It’s reasonably long for an internet manifesto, so don’t bother reading it if you want some hot and secret tips that will instantly make you awesome overnight. Don’t read it if you don’t want to do a lot of hard work.

See, there are very few people who truly create the lives they want, and the reason is because getting what you want is hard. People don’t want to hear that, though. People want things to be complex but easy, because that combination means that once you learn the magic trick that you don’t currently know, you can have your dream without much effort. But that’s not the way it is. Success in just about everything is actually very simple… but it’s not easy.

Once you understand that — once you really grasp it and commit to busting your ass because the end result is worth it — then you’ll be able to achieve pretty much anything you want.

You may not want to believe it.

But it’s true.

There is no escaping reason; no denying purpose. Because as we both know, without purpose, we would not exist.

– Agent Smith, The Matrix

I haven’t been writing much lately. That’s because I’ve been writing.

See, I feel a little guilty about not posting often enough on my blog. I’ve gotten a few emails, basically saying, “Where are you?” and “What are you up to?” and honestly, it’s flattering that anyone would care. When you start blogging, you assume that everyone will hang on your every word, waiting with bated breath for every new post. Then you realize that for the most part, you could drop off the face of the earth and nobody would notice. So yeah, it’s cool that people have asked.

But the truth is that while it may look like I’ve been ignoring my blogging responsibilities (whatever that means), the truth is that I haven’t been writing here because I’ve been writing — writing more than ever — elsewhere. I haven’t forgotten you; I’ve been saving up the mojo I’d normally deliver so as to deliver it later in one big hit. All of those awesome blog posts you’re missing? The brain juice that would normally go into them is going into one big thing — one masterpiece that I’ve been working on for months. One Big Kahuna.

And soon, I’m going to deliver said Big Kahuna, here, for free.

I’ve been told that my posts awaken people’s desires to “do epic shit,” and if that’s true, then tighten your seat belt, because it’s about to get epicer. Epicified. Epiclicious.

But before we talk about that, let’s talk about you. Really YOU, at the deepest level possible.

Let’s talk about why you’re here at all.

You must have a purpose

I swear that all of life’s answers are in the film The Matrix. So let’s heed Agent Smith’s advice, such as it is. Without purpose, we would not exist — not in any way that matters. But with purpose? With a mission? With both hands on the steering wheel? Well with that, hell… you can live forever.

So stop right now and ask yourself why you do what you do each day. Really think about it.

When you get up and go to work — be it in an office or at home — why are you doing it? Maybe it’s because you need money to pay the mortgage. Maybe it’s because you need money to eat. Fair enough; we live in a material world and we are all material girls (and guys).

Now, step back. Why do you do the specific job you do? Meaning; why are you doing that instead of something else? Is it because it’s what you always wanted to do? Is it because you’re making a difference in the world? Or is it because it was the only job you could find? Is it because you “kind of fell into it”? Is it because it’s what your parents expected you to do, or because you had a major in X in college and figured a job in X was therefore the only logical next step?

Hmm.

Now, pull back further. What are your big goals for yourself and, if you have one, your family? What did you want to be when you grew up, and why did you want that? What do you want your legacy to be? How do you want to be remembered after you’re gone? What do you want your kids’ memories of you to be? When you’re old, looking back on your life, what would you like to be proud that you accomplished?

Don’t just scan these questions. Stop and think about each one.

I’m serious. After I wrote my first epic post, people said, That’s awesome, but how do you do those epic things?

This is how. Trust me.

Stop and think about your purpose, because almost nobody ever does. Day to day life has a way of hypnotizing us. Have you ever set out for a certain destination in your car and missed a turn because you’ve zoned out and your brain is taking you the way you usually go, like to the grocery store? This is the same phenomenon. It’s really easy to lose track of the big whys while following your autopilot.

So I’ll ask you, again, at the risk of being annoying, to really stop and think.

Why do you do what you do? What is your purpose? Not the purpose you think you should have, or the purpose appropriate to what you already have going on (“I am the CEO of a major company, therefore I am responsible for XYZ”). Don’t do “therefore.” Don’t start with where you are and reverse-engineer the purpose you therefore must have in life. Start at the top. Start with why you’d like to be here, regardless of where you actually are right now. Think of your ideal purpose. What you think you were truly meant to be, or, in the absence of some huge epiphany, what you’d LIKE to be, if you could be anything.

Got it?

Now, is it aligned with what you’re doing every day?

And if it’s not, are you implementing a plan every day to bring those two things closer and closer into alignment?

Usually, the answers to those questions are both no. And when they’re both no, it’s because the people behind those no’s don’t think their “deep purpose” is realistic in today’s world of cars and houses and currencies. There’s dreams and then there’s real life, these people say. I wanted a unicorn, too… but we need to face reality.

But what if I told you that reality isn’t all it’s purported to be?

Why I do what I do

This blog has been about a lot of stuff. When I first started, it was a humor blog. Then it became a tech tips blog. Then it became a business blog. Finally, in the last few years, I seem to have settled into writing what I term “epic shit.” I write posts with depressing titles that hopefully have get-off-your-fucking-ass-now-before-it’s-too-late bottom-line messages, like The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You and You Are Dying and Your World is a Lie. It may look like I’m a masochist, like I’m obsessed with death and pain and being extreme. Recently, I realized why. It dawned on me why I keep telling you that you’re dying a little every day, and that one day — sooner than you realize — you’ll be underground.

It’s because I care.

Let me tell you a sad story.

I ran into an old friend recently, who we’ll call Bill. Bill has two kids and I don’t think he enjoys them, because he’s doing the same job that he was doing the last time I saw him years ago and still doesn’t like it, and it takes up all of his time and he’s still barely making ends meet, and at night he’s tired and can only collapse in front of the TV before getting up to do it again the next day. He’s a creative, smart guy, but can’t seem to make a go of his creative endeavors. He has some ideas, and I wanted to encourage him to do those things. But the problem was, I could tell he didn’t really believe any of them would ever work. He was a shipwreck survivor alone in the middle of the ocean, saying “Maybe a ship will come save me” because he has to say something… and meanwhile he’s writing his will in his head.

I wanted to encourage Bill, but it’s not that simple because his current ideas are not whiz-bang tickets to freedom even if they work. They’re the tip of the iceberg. They’re a beginning — and a beginning is a fantastic, amazing, beautiful, magical thing. But no matter how Bill’s “beginnings” turn out, it’ll be up to him to have the courage to take the next step once they’re over.

I wanted to tell Bill that a beginning was worth it no matter what happened. That perseverence mattered more than any one event. That the ability to manufacture a distant light at the end of a very long tunnel was what really made the difference. But how do you tell someone — casually, in a ten-minute, how’ve-you-been conversation — that his venture probably would fail and that it’d still be worth it? How do you tell someone who has no real reason to believe that he should make those doomed beginnings anyway because the road to success is paved with failures?

When we parted ways, I wished him good luck, but I knew nothing would happen. He probably wouldn’t even try what he said he wanted to try, and if he did try and it didn’t work (and by “work,” I mean work entirely, getting him 100% of the way there) he’d quit. Then he’d keep doing the job and not having the time and not enjoying his kids as much as he should, and he’d accept it because he’s a good soldier in the army of life and knows he should be grateful for what he has because so many have less. He’d know, as everyone knows, that some people are lucky and some are not. That we get what we get and we don’t throw a fit.

But this is a lie. It’s a big, big lie.

We think certain things “just are” and that we need to “settle and face reality.” But it’s a lie. What you think is real isn’t real. You’re living by bogus rules, bogus limitations. Almost anything you can be or do or have, you can be or do or have. The reason most people never get what they want is because they believe so firmly that it’s impossible that they never start — never realizing that if they started anyway and kept at it, one day they’d wake up to discover that they’d done it.

The reason I do what I do is because I want to expose the lies we live by to the Bills of the world — even if I have to shake them by the shoulders and slap them around to get it to sink in.

We think we need more how-to, but we don’t. We already know how. What we need are tools like courage, strength, optimism, fear, and fearlessness.

I’ve written a lot of stuff that is intended to wake people up to the realities of existence and to help dispel the bullshit, but something more is needed. Something bigger.

My legacy. For you.

When I say that I want to make a difference — that it makes me sad to run into people like Bill and that I’m doing what I’m doing because I want to be remembered as having made a difference — I’m telling you the truth. I have other ways I can make money. At this point, I really don’t even need the blog.

I haven’t been writing much here, on this blog, because I’m writing what I feel is as definitive a guide as I can write on the topic of seizing the day until it screams. It’s going to be called How To Be Legendary, and it’ll be available soon.

The first part of How To Be Legendary is about the lies you’ve been sold on, and the real truths behind them.

The second part is a stepwise procedure for achieving anything, based on a simple premise: You don’t need me to teach you anything. You just need to do what you already know, and to do it every day. (And by the way, that really is the central idea. You don’t even need to download the book now that you’ve read the last two sentences. Achievement is simple. Not easy, but simple.)

One more thing: How To Be Legendary will be free.

So that’s what I’ve been working on. That’s why I haven’t been blogging much. I haven’t been giving you small snippets on being awesome because I’ve been busy rolling all of that awesomeness into one big punch. The knockout punch, hopefully, designed to unplug you from the matrix.

And with this, I hope to make my difference.

Stay tuned.

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UPDATE: My manifesto How To Be Legendary: A Realistic Guide to Being the Superhuman You’re Supposed to Be is now available, for free. And if you’d like some guidance and to have your feet held to the fire in your pursuit of becoming Legendary, be sure to check out my Everyday Legendary community.