KBOO interviews me.

Newsies Lisa Loving and Annette Newell talk with me about my book, PLEDGE: The Public Radio Fund Drive during an episode of KBOO’s “News from the Boo.” It was the fastest 9 minutes ever.  Find it here: https://www.kboo.fm/media/74561-pledge-book

(Overcoming) The Fear

Whenever I see or hear of someone that inspires me with what they’ve done, it reminds me of how scary it can be to put yourself out there. I’ve been feeling that especially as my book filters it way out to more people. I found somebody else who gets exactly how I’ve been feeling recently. It’s a part of a blogpost by Carol Lynch Williams on her blog, “Throwing up Words.” It was republished by Chris Crowe on his blog, “Writing is an Act of Faith.”

“It is an act of faith to… plop down in a chair—on a good, bad, or indifferent day—and to face the blank page or computer screen with a subconscious voice drowning out all your thoughts and inspiration with head-splitting shrieks of high expectations, self-criticism and self-doubt. To put that first letter on the great unknown of the blank page is an act of faith comparable to anything the boldest dreamers and explorers have done: to go boldly where no one has gone before. Faith is what turns that first letter into the first word, the first word into the first sentence, the first sentence into the first paragraph, the first paragraph into the first page. Moving that pen or striking that keyboard is like planting a tiny mustard seed with the hope, the faith, that it will, eventually, with time and effort, turn into something much grander than the original speck of organic material.

It is an audacious act of faith to keep stringing words and sentences together for an extended period of time, hoping that with enough effort, they will eventually add up to a book that is much greater than the sum of its parts. You hope that, even in the face of self-doubt, rejection, and failure, your faith will give you the courage to write that first letter, to plant a tiny speck on the blank page and to hope, no, to know, that if you keep going, sooner or later it will begin to add up to something. It’s a leap of faith, really, but you have learned that if you take that leap into the great blank unknown, you can write. Believe it or not, you can write. Really, you can write.”

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Branding Music for PLEDGEtheBook

I comissioned two pieces of music to coincide with the book’s release. I’ll be including them in marketing pieces for the book later in the month. The composers and I worked hard to find that public radio feel. I think we got it.