deadlines

Wow, have I neglect­ed this blog in recent weeks (okay, months), or what? I’ve been fever­ish­ly focus­ing on knock­ing out the CHANGEMAKERS book, which also meant I was fever­ish­ly focus­ing on find­ing a method to the mad­ness of knock­ing out the CHANGEMAKERS book. I wrote a bit about my strug­gles over on the Emu’s Debuts blog.
Thanks to the sup­port of my fel­low EMu’s fol­low­ing that post, I’ve since hit a pret­ty good stride and am feel­ing much more com­fort­able about my abil­i­ty to fin­ish the book with­out let­ting it kill me. I’ve got a dandy col­lec­tion of spread­sheets to track my progress by word count, by chap­ter, and by research. I’ve got some reward sys­tems in place (i.e. Lindt’s A Touch of Sea Salt bars).
So, things are flow­ing much more smooth­ly now with the writ­ing part, and I am thrilled that the inter­views are rolling in as well. I can’t wait to share what some of the sto­ries about what these ven­ture teams are doing! I’ve known I want­ed to write this book for years, but now that I am actu­al­ly doing it, I’m hav­ing even more fun than I thought I would. Hear­ing these teenagers talk about their ideas, their goals, their suc­cess sto­ries: WOW! It is so inspir­ing, and on so many dif­fer­ent lev­els. When­ev­er I start to think maybe I can’t do this, that this book is too ambi­tious or the dead­line is too short, I just think about what some of them have done. If they are chang­ing the world at the age of 18, or 15, or 10, sure­ly I can write one lit­tle book, right? And if my lit­tle book can help just one more teen pull off even a tiny frac­tion of what these kids are already accom­plish­ing, then I know all of my efforts will have been worth it.
After the book is done, I hope I will be able to share with you here some snip­pets of the inter­views and out­takes from the pro­files I’m work­ing on, because these young peo­ple will blow you away, and in the best pos­si­ble kind of way. I hope my read­ers will be as affect­ed by learn­ing about these teens’ ven­tures as I have been.
When we watch the TV news or read the news­pa­per head­lines, it’s easy to get dis­cour­aged about the state of the world. But writ­ing this book is the com­plete oppo­site expe­ri­ence. It’s hard to get dis­cour­aged about where the world is head­ing when there are so many young peo­ple like the ones I am writ­ing about out there.
And now, back to work! Please for­give me if I’m a lit­tle qui­et for the next few months. 😉