Things I've learned from being an author

As some might know, a while back a book of mine was published.  Just a minor work, but nonetheless.  I'm trying to finish another, but work has been setting me back.

My book.

Having had a book published has taught me a few things, some of which reinforced what I already knew, and other things which I did not.  Here's a few observations.

Writing is hard work.

I write all the time.  I'm nearly compulsive at it.  From time to time people will ask me, for example, how much time I spend writing these blog entries.  Next to none is the answer.  I'm an extremely rapid typist and generally know what I'm going to say before I say it, so it doesn't take much time at all.  Most of these entries are written early in the morning after I've had breakfast and before I go to work, which itself is pretty darned early as a rule.

At work, as I'm a trial lawyer, I write a lot as well.  I have a lot of days where I basically write all day long until I get home from work.  

But, what surprised me, is that writing a book, on your own time, takes piles of discipline.  And it's often the case that after a full day at work, I can hardly sit down in the evening and write a sentence.

I'm an extremely shy person.

People who've known me since I was a kid know this.  I'm an introvert and I'm shy.  And by that I mean I'm genuinely shy.

What people often fail to appreciate about shy people is that almost all of them can, and do, check their shyness at their occupational door and proceed through their tasks unhindered.  That's why there are a lot of people in public roles who are rip snorting shy, but that's generally unknown. There are shy actors, shy musicians, shy public persons.  Actor James Garvin, for example, who recently died was quite shy.

In my case, I meet with a lot of people in an average week and I'm told that I seem really interactive and talkative with my clients.  I don't observe that to be the case myself, but I suspect that's true.  My father was a very shy man but he interacted with people all the time, and I can vividly recall him doing that, which he did on a daily basis.

Where it catches up with you, basically, is on your off time.  That's where the shyness comes back in.  And I've learned that here as I'm not only shy, I'm pretty modest.

A modest person shouldn't really claim to be modest, but if its a genuine attribute, you might be modest and be aware of it.   I have a relatively good idea of what I've done and accomplished, but I don't really say a whole lot about it, that's the combination of shyness and modesty.  Years ago, for example, I was in the start of a trial and an opposing lawyer, who had studied up on me, asked me if I was part of a group that had tried a certain number of cases.  I'm not.  "How many cases have you tried?" was her then question.  "I don't know" was the answer.  I really don't.  I could figure it out, and have from time to time, and its a large number.  But I don't keep a running tab, to paint on the side of my fuselage like I'm a P-51 Mustang pilot in World War Two or something.  That lawyer was amazed.  She later noted "You try everything".  I don't, but I have tried a lot of cases to juries and interact with them pretty well, but don't talk that up.  The point being, that you can know what you've done without talking it up much.

But I didn't think that most folks I know would realize I'd written a book, but they figured it out pretty quickly.  And so I'm asked a lot about it, and it always embarrasses me. Some tease me in a good natured way.  I have a hard time talking to anyone about it.

I have also found that I have a very hard time being in a public setting regarding my work.  That's odd, but true.  As an author you have to do that, which I didn't really realize, and its an odd experience for me.  It's one thing to be in a courtroom on another's cause, it's another thing to be signing your own works or talking about them.