Welcome to Day 2. In case you’re just joining me or have randomly stumbled upon this blog post, this is the second of what I intend to be twenty-eight consecutive posts on my blog, one for every passing day. I started yesterday with some reflections on my journey into writing and blogging. I want to extend those thoughts by reflecting on how I moved from blogger and writer to published author in 2021.
My author’s story is inevitably intertwined with the coronavirus pandemic. COVID transformed the way we work and provided a flexibility that we all plan never to let go of. Working from home meant I saved a couple of hours from driving through traffic, and I could now spend that time with family or on hobbies. Writing automatically got some more allocation. Before March 2020, my last two blog posts had been in Feb 2017 and Sep 2018. Then I posted twice in late March 2020, and have posted every month since then.
Writing regularly meant getting more ideas about other things to write. And then I started setting harder targets for myself on how often to write. Then one day in February 2021, about a year into COVID, the idea struck me like lightning. I had been praying with a few friends for an hour every Sunday evening for about five months. On one of those Sundays, after the prayer, the thought to write a book was strongly impressed on my mind. The outline was clear, and I knew what the title would be.
That same evening, I picked up the phone and called my friend and brother, Olawale Perfect. He runs a media outfit (wigradio.com) and had published a number of his own books. He even started writing the first book while we were undergraduate students at the University of Lagos. I wanted to get help from a hands-on person, who knew exactly what to do from first word to first print, and who could give me a timeline and modest budget for whatever quality I wanted. Perfect was my man for the moment.
After that call, I drafted the outline and started writing the day after. My focus was to complete the first draft in the shortest time possible; edits could follow afterwards. There is never a perfect time for any important task, and getting started is key to getting going. I found from experience that things become easier to achieve once you get started – the goal comes closer to sight with every step. And so it was, less than five months after the idea first came into my mind, that I was having a virtual launch of my first book.
Now that you are a Christian was first published in July 2021, with one-thousand copies initially printed and distributed freely within a few months. Another thousand copies were printed in February 2022, and are still in distribution (free of charge as well). From COVID-enabled writing to friendship-enabled publishing, the unrelated events that made a conviction come to life in such a short time can only be traced to a combination of God’s wisdom and man’s diligence in pursuit of purpose. See you tomorrow!
Chronicles of a Journeyman 