Pleased to Meet Me

Hello, reading, writing and coaching fam! Maybe we’ve known each other for a loooong time, maybe we’re meeting for the first time. If that’s the case, welcome! I’m so happy that you’re joining me on this new adventure. If we’re old friends, it’s so good to see you. Thank you for all your love and support so far.

As you may know if you’ve landed here, my name is Kerry. I’m a writer, project manager, and Author Accelerator certified book coach. My intention with this space is to share wins, fails, lessons, and wisdom learned over a lifetime of reading and writing, more than a decade of project management, and now into year two of my book coaching career. 

My hope is that you will learn things that make your own book-writing process easier, more efficient, and bring you greater joy. Whether your goal is to self-publish or get an agent and a traditional publishing deal, there are fundamentals of narrative and process that will serve you well. Maybe you’re working on your first book or your fifteenth – there are still things that we can learn and do better.

My Midlife Crisis

You can read a little more about my personal and professional credentials on my About page, but I’d have to say that my current ‘phase’ started in 2016. I was burned out, working for a company that I loved but a job that I didn’t. 

Several years earlier, my husband and I decided to take our savings, say good-bye to the home-buying plan for a bit, and use the money to help him realize his dream of opening his own business, one that I’m proud to say is still thriving (as much as possible in Covid times). Not only is he doing what he was meant to, he’s now happy (exhausted but happy), which is a huge change from the years prior when he had a vision but no outlet for it.

In 2016, it was my turn. I’m good at project management, but it does not set me on fire, not even close. What does? Reading and writing! I joke that it was a mid-life crisis (just happened to be right around my fortieth birthday), but it was time, Bob and I agreed, for me to do some work that brought me joy. So I left my PM job and started writing. 

For the first couple of years, I futzed around with some short stories, wrote the bad first ten or twenty pages of a few different novels, and jotted down ideas for a bunch more, but nothing was really sticking. Yes, I was much happier when I woke up every day but I was having a hard time finding an idea that felt like something I wanted to stick with for more than a draft or even a few pages. 

Then one of my best friends had a stroke – actually, four mini-strokes. Thankfully he was largely ok physically but he definitely had issues with language recall. Part of his rehab was to read and I decided to read with him so that we could discuss the books together. He chose some books from The Pirates! series by Gideon Defoe (which are hilarious). 

That got me thinking about history and whether there were any famous female pirates that I’d never heard of. Of course there were! (Just like there are TONS of stories of women doing all the same things that men did, but those aren’t the ones we know…but I digress.)

The Pirate Novel is Born

And everything just clicked. I love historical fiction, I love doing research, I believe strongly in correcting the imbalance in whose stories have been and are told over the course of time. My chosen protagonist, Mary Read, is a real person but very little is really known about her and there is scant primary source material to be found. (Trust me, I went digging into British Navy archives from the time but there is only so much you can do online, even now. Shocking that no one has gotten around to digitizing records from the early 1700s yet! [Kidding!])

I’d found the thing that set me on fire. The only problem was, I had no idea how to write a novel. Certainly they don’t spring forth fully formed from a writer’s head to the page, as some people seem to believe. I knew there was a lot more to it than that. But what, exactly, was that?

How The Heck Do I Write This Thing?

Over the next few years, I took classes, both in person (at Grub Street, a fantastic resource for those of us lucky enough to have it close) and online. I generated a lot of pages and eventually came out the other side with a 457 page draft. Great, right?! More like, yikes! Many well-established authors have trouble selling books that long–unless you’re Diana Gabaldon or George R.R. Martin, good luck! A debut author needs to be aiming for about 90,000 words for a work of adult historical fiction. (I’ll have a lot more to say about word counts, genre, and all that stuff in future posts; the parameters are also pretty easily found with a simple Google search).

So I had this beast of a book that needed to be cut by a third and not a clue how to start thinking about it. Submitting ten pages at a time to a workshop class wasn’t turning out to be helpful. 

Book Coaching? That’s a Thing?

Some additional searching led me to Author Accelerator, who at the time was offering an accelerator program that would pair you with a coach for six or twelve months with the goal of finishing a draft or revision. They also offered some self-paced courses, which felt like a good way to dip my toe in and see what they were all about without committing a large chunk of money to an unknown.

It was a life-changing decision. 

I bought one course, then another. Then I found out that AA was training people and had created a certification program to become a book coach. The courses were good quality and Jennie Nash was clearly legit. 

I told my husband about this germ of an idea to actually do this thing, become a book coach. He said he hadn’t seen me this excited since we had agreed that I would quit my PM job and write full-time. 

It was a big commitment, both financially and time-wise but I did it and haven’t looked back. I was certified in September of 2000 and now proudly help serve others like myself whose dream it is to write their novels, put their stories and voices out into the world, in the best way possible.

Accountability, Encouragement, and Support

What happened to my own book, you may be wondering? It’s still alive and yes, I have hired book coaches (and tapped some others in my network) to help me assess the work that needs to be done. It’s not inconsiderable but they also assure me that it’s probably closer than I think it is, and that gives me hope. That’s what we book coaches are here for–accountability, encouragement, constructive criticism, and above all, support. 

So! I hope this serves as an introduction to me, what I’m all about, and what you can expect to find in this little corner of the interwebs. I’d love to hear more about you, what brought you here, what you’d like to hear from me. Please reach out and let me know how I can help. I look forward to hearing from you!

—Kerry