This site used to have four tabs—Arrival Point, Books, Q&A and Ten Thousand Flowers. If you look up at the top of the page, you’ll notice that the “Books” tab is gone.
“Books” was for my wee little book Catbooks and Other Methods: Free Writing Techniques To Clear Your Head, Improve Your Mood and Make Waiting At the Dentist’s Office Just a Little More Bearable. It came out via Lullwater Press, which was basically the micropress my father set up to put out a textbook on nursing that my mother had written. He let me put out the book under that aegis, though I did most of the work involved, so it was functionally self-published.
I put it out in 2011 and to this day it has not sold enough copies for me to collect on the money it earned. It’s easy to explain why—I barely told anybody about it. Perhaps on some level I realized it wasn’t that good. It was created in what was likely a fit of hypomania and was pretty much assembled from blog posts I made here with a few additions, making it more of a chapbook than anything.
When I set up the page, I promised two more books to be eventually released, with titles that changed over time. One ended up being called How to be a Bazzillionare: Why You Don’t Need to be a Rich Person to Live a Rich Life; the other was Taming the NoMonster: How to Do the Things That You Don’t Want to Do. The former was to be a compilation and expansion of the “Rich Living” posts on this very blog; the latter was an intended treatise on how to stop procrastinating.
I’m abandoning both projects, and pulling down Catbooks very soon. I came to realize that all of them were rooted in the hypomanic arrogance that is I’ve Got It All Figured Out and Here’s How to Do It. Even if I do have it figured out, the only person I have it figured out for is myself. I had done no research to support my claims beyond my own experience, which isn’t helpful to a wide audience because what works for my bipolar-ass brain and unconventional life story isn’t too likely to work for anybody else.
Plus, I’m working on other books, fictional ones that I hope will please others the way they please me. (You can find them, or will find them when I at least release the first one at http://sarashay.com.) I’ve done more work to research those than I have for any of my self-help efforts, and I’m having much more fun writing them.
I don’t regret putting out Catbooks, because it gave me a crash-course in self-publishing and an object lesson in the importance of self-promotion. But it’s time to close those open loops in my head so I can focus on things I have genuine authority on.
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