Write the Truest Sentence You Know

In case you have missed the update, I have honorably and humbly been signed to be a 2023 author for The Good House (formerly That Guy’s House INTL) and am currently turning my pitch (a chapter outline) into a manuscript of a non-fiction, spiritually-centered text. This is a lifetime dream for me – to be published and have my text distributed worldwide.

Of course, as I begin to compose my text, stitching together the pieces of my soul into something tangible, logical, and very real, I am drawn back to Hemingway; his life, his writings, his experience of being a writer and bleeding onto pages.

As almost everyone who knows me well enough is aware, Hemingway awakens something in me, as a writer. We could not be any more different from one another as human beings, and yet as writers, I feel we are the same. The passion he feels for language and for wanting to share that with others flows through my veins, as well. Though he saw each book as a lion hunted, and continuously felt as though he had to prove who he was with book after book, the foundational intention was the same: to live on through text.

I have no fear of dying – much like Hemingway – but I have always felt that my legacy would be captured in pages with ink more than anything else. I do not write with the intent to make great piles of money, and the thought of fame (especially in the spiritual community) is how I might describe my literal nightmare, but I do write to change lives with my words. Like Hemingway who said that a good book impacts people in a way that reverberates through their entire existence, for all their lives, I want the words I share to do the same. And that is why I write. And that is why I am piecing together this book.

While Hemingway wrote fiction, it was all based on his life experiences. He always said that a good writer needs to have lived what he is writing about. I find his stories to be transparent autobiographies of his emotional processes and experiences. And so I write a non-fiction text which is similar in nature and has the same goal in mind: to dissect the lessons that come from lived human experiences – my human experience.

I have been told by my spiritual advisor that Hemingway is a writing guide of mine, and so I hope to invoke him as I birth this project over the next twelve months. I’m over 11k words into it already, with so much more to say, so much more to share.

It is wild to call myself a writer, first and foremost. It is wild to me to know I will be wearing the hat of “author” which is something I have dreamt of for as long as I can remember. There are days when it floods out of me, and there are days when it hurts to type. I will embrace every moment of this journey.

xo C