Creating Your Next Big Project (And Staying Sane, and Having a Life, While Doing So)

There’s no question. Writing a book – should you ever do this – will take a big hunka outta your life.

This is why many people balk.

During book-writing, you are switching gears from immediate-income-producing actions (coaching, working with clients of any sort, speaking, etc.) to the relative isolation of being tight-focused on your book production.

Nothing will make that really easy.

There are some things that you can do, though, that will make it bearable.

This is why I’m spending so much time writing to you about your writing your blog.

Creating the Elephant for Others to Absorb (One Little Bit at a Time)

Your book will be the product that others will eat: they will consume, they will digest your book. This means that other people will decide that what you have to offer is so good that they will take the time and energy to intake your book (or your video series, your TED podcasts, your whatever).

So let’s change our analogy. (Out of respect for elephants, and for people.)

People will not actually eat your elephant.

However, over time, they will absorb your elephant’s wisdom.

(There now, that’s a much cooler analogy, isn’t it?)

But before they can do that, you need to create the elephant.

That’s why I recommend blogging your way to your next book.

This Week’s Power Tip: Intralink to Pull Your Ideas Together (And Guide Your People to Connected Thoughts)

Here’s an illustration from my own work.

Two years ago, I published my second book. This publication came twenty years after publishing my first. Instead of continuing in the direction of the technical material of the first, I struck out in an entirely different direction.

Your Next Creative Endeavor Requires Incubation, Rough Creation, and Refinement

My second book was Unveiling: The Inner Journey. (And of course, it is available from Amazon, trade paper or Kindle.)

Of the twenty years that it took to create the next book, there were three major stages. If you take on a similar task, you’ll experience the same:

• Incubation – Letting the essence of your next creation emerge from your subconscious; realizing that you really are called to do the next big thing,
• Roughing It Out – Doing the research, creating first rough drafts, building and reworking the core organization – and (if needed) gaining new skills or finding a new way to write, talk, or communicate with others, and then
• Refinement – Moving from raw and rough to refined, polished, ready for publication – a stage that takes more time, energy, perseverance, and dedication than we ever want to contemplate.

Here’s a brief outline of my own timetable:

Incubation: It took me four years to catch my breath, and realize that I had a new book emerging inside me. Four years before I even realized that I wanted to write this new book.

Initial Creation: Then, it took me fourteen years to get a very raw rough draft into shape. (We’ll discuss that some other time.)

Refinement: After that, it took me 2 1/2 years to go from rough to polished to published. This was 2 1/2 years from the time that I said to myself, sitting down with all my assembled rough, “I can get this book out. There’s enough here. I’m ready.”

Even When You’re Putting Final Touches on Things, New Insights Keep Coming

Now, even though I had my rough, and was going into full-fledged edit-and-revise mode – I still kept getting new insights. (This is why blogging will come in handy for you.) Because I was focused on just getting a single product out the door, these new insights kept working their way into my book. (That’s why it took 2 1/2 years to get from rough to product, instead of my originally-projected two-to-three months.)

Making the Transition: Putting Insights into Blogs First, then Assembly into Book Later

During my revise-and-edit stage, one of the insights that I had dealt with archetypes.

I got enough material together, and organized well-enough, to get some really good new stuff into Unveiling.

However, the insights didn’t stop.

So, I began capturing them in my blog.

Regular Blogging Helps You Bring Your Ideas to Maturity

One of the most challenging concepts that I evolved had to do with the notion of a Hierophant. A Hierophant, as I found, is a transformational guide. He or she is more than a teacher. A teacher conveys known material, and measures success by the student’s absorption of this material.

A Hierophant, in contrast, deals with transforming the student – bringing that student from one state to another.

Example Hierophants include Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars) and Mr. Miyagi (from the Karate Kid).

Over time, and in about a half-dozen blogs, I fleshed out the Hierophant concept.

Today’s Secret Weapon: Use Intralinking to Connect Your Dots

It took me months to develop enough to be clear and coherent on one new topic: the Hierophant archetype.

In a recent blog, I introduced a new archetype (Hathor, the goddess of love, sensuality, pleasure and romance). However, I brought in the Hierophant archetype in support of this new one.

At the end of the blog, I intralinked to (created links to my previous blog posts) all my previous Hierophant blogs.

Below, I show you how this looked. (The material below is taken from The Magical Turning Point – And What It Means to You (from the regular blog for Unveiling: The Inner Journey.)

---

Related Posts: Hierophant – Hathor’s Protector

• Our Hierophant: Mentor, Protector, and Guide for Our Love-Goddess Hathor
• Hathor or Hierophant – Who’s On Top?
• The Hierophant as Guru/Guide (also deals with Hierophant/Hathor Connection)
• Are Hierophants Really That Important? (McDonald’s Thinks So!)
• Who – and What – Is a Hierophant?
• The Hero’s Quest and the Hierophant – Part 1

---

You can see from the above example (six intralinks or links to other blog posts, taken from a different blog) that I culled out six different blogposts on the Hierophant concept. They range in posting date from last week (the most recent) to about this time, two years ago. (They’re listed chronologically; most recent first.)

That’s two years of developing a single concept over time.

You can see the evolution of thought.

The first blog post is the one at the bottom of the listing – The Hero’s Quest and the Hierophant – Part 1. It reads almost as a teaser; I don’t really divulge anything about the Hierophant concept itself. However, I do set a lot of context – and this is important when introducing a new idea. This was approximately two years ago today; September 22nd, 2011. (Today is September 25, 2013).

A week later, in the next blogpost (Who – and What – Is a Hierophant?), I introduced a first definition – a first pulling out of the Hierophant concept in a useful way. If you read this one, you’ll see that I was still sort of groping towards definition-by-examples.

In the next two blogposts (Are Hierophants Really That Important? (McDonald’s Thinks So!) and The Hierophant as Guru/Guide (also deals with Hierophant/Hathor Connection)), you’ll see that I was getting clearer – the whole Hierophant notion took on more crispness, as I found more examples through reading books and talking with people.

These early blogs were a lot like my approach to writing my first book, when I wrote a set of “annotated bibliography” columns for a highly specialized computer science journal. They were expostulation. I was developing and framing a new idea, and using the blog to flesh it out for myself. Readers benefited – but at this stage, I was still really writing more for myself than for them.

Then, I began to look at the connection between the Hierophant and other archetypes. That started a whole exploration. Once again, I was back to early-stage expostulating. (For this, see two blogs – Hathor or Hierophant – Who’s On Top? and a blog that followed shortly therafter, Our Hierophant: Mentor, Protector, and Guide for Our Love-Goddess Hathor.) These were written a little over two years ago; March of 2012.

By now, I was getting some solid content – material that could be used to generate a rough and raw draft for a new book. (See my blog in this series from two weeks ago; How to Write Your Book by Writing Your Blog.)

Finally, I began to get some real crispness – not only about the Hierophant notion, but also how this archetype “played with others.” (Specifically, how this archetype interacted with the Hathor-goddess archetype; see The Magical Turning Point and What It Means for You.)

In this last blog, you’ll see that my concepts are clearer – they are more well-defined, their relations with others are clearer. My writing style is less going through my personal journey, and more authoritative.

In short, it took a two-year timeframe to clearly bring out and define one concept.

Yes, there are other concepts and works that I’ve brought out in the same timeframe.

What you’re seeing here, though, is the time that it takes to bring your ideas to maturity.

Translating: From My Experience to Your Writing (and Your Idea-Generation)

Your first blogs on a subject will be exploratory. You may just be sensing that something is ready to emerge, and setting context. Think of yourself as an artist, working with oil paints. Your first step will be rough pen-and-pencil or charcoal drafts, or quick sketches. Then, you’ll prep the canvas.

Then, your next few blogs on that subject will give it tentative rough shape. In “artist’s terms,” you’re blocking out the main figures.

After that, your work focuses on connecting your concepts to one another. How do they support? How do they interconnect? How do they, taken together, build a larger whole?

If you were an artist, this would be the time in which you’d work on connecting visual flow; making sure that colors, patterns, or motifs in one area connect to another.

Finally, you come to the finishing work.

As a writer, though, what you’ve brought forth in your blogs is simply the core element of your ideas and concepts. Taking them into book form, or making them ready for broader dissemination, is an entirely new stage.

The point is: by using your blog, you’ve generated, fleshed out, and developed your new and significant intellectual contributions. You know what you know.

This is a good place.

---

To your health, wealth, and well-being –

Alianna

The Power of Categories – The Best Way to Increase Your Blog’s Searchability

Have you ever had the experience of people coming to your blog, and then leaving after reading just one post?

Is there a chance that even though you’ve written extensively on a topic, the right audience is not learning that you are the world’s most authoritative expert?

Are the people who read your blog simply getting lost in the woods – without a clear sense of direction?

This may have to do with the backbone that you’ve set up for your blog series: the way in which you use categories and tags.

Blog Categories and Tags: The Backbone Structure for Your Blog Series

In the last blogpost, Dominate the Blogosphere: Use Categories and Tags to Establish Authority, I introduced a new topic with you: How you can make your blog more useful – and more findable/searchable – and more interesting – when you are smart about using blog categories and tags.

Very simply put: If you don’t make smart use of categories and tags, your blog is in chaos. There may be “hidden gems,” but no one can find them.

The “old saw” amongst bloggers is: Content is King, and Relevance is Queen.

I’ll add to that by saying: Findability is the Wizard.

 

 

When you do some simple and straightforward things that make your blogs findable searchable, then you become the Great Seer: you discover the mysteries of the universe and then help others use these insights in a practical and helpful manner.

They way in which you do this is to use categories and tags in a smart, well-structured manner.

Blog Categories in Transition: Before and After Pictures

In the previous blog post, Dominate the Blogosphere, I showed a picture of a blog series that I’d just imported into a new WordPress site from its original home in Google Blogger. An extract from that image is to the right. This is how the categories in this blog looked at the beginning of today’s work.

In this blog series (the one whose categories are on the right), I write a lot about archetypes. However, looking at the categories – as shown in the listing on the right – it would be hard for a first-time reader to figure out that archetypes were a persistent and dominant theme.

The “archetypes” in this blog series (shown on the right) are also a rather complex theme – there are many sub-topics under these archetypes. Many of them are topics for multiple blogs; I want the blog series to be easily searchable for them.

As I re-organize this blog’s categories, one step will be to use both parent and child categories.

Before I can do that, though, I need to clean the clutter. There are about 135 “categories” in this listing. These are really the old “labels” from the Google Blogger – and so are not really categories at all.

Before I can design my new category sets, I need to clean out all those little topics that I will probably never mention again. Also, names of people, places, and things are not – and never will be – “categories.” Categories are broad topics, and proper nouns (the names of anything) are specifics.

Category or Tag? A Quick Rule-of-Thumb

A quick rule of thumb helps us with our first-pass decisions:

• Categories are broad – general-purpose topics; things that comprise overarching “themes,” and
• Tags are for specifics – names of people, places, and things, as well as for details and things mentioned-in-passing.

Step 1 – Cleaning Out the Clutter

Re-building the categories a lot like cleaning out a closet or a garage. The first step is to clean out the clutter.
In the case of the blog series illustrated to the right, this means moving a lot of things from categories to tags. Specifically, these will include:

1. All book titles,
2. All names for persons and organizations, and
3. All names of things and events.

To do this, I’ve used a “category-to-tag” tool available in the Import section of WordPress. I didn’t know about this tool the first time that I did a Google Blogger-to-WordPress Blog several months ago, and this chore took hours. (Maybe even days.)

Just now – by going to the Import section under the “Tools” Menu, I found the Category-to-Tag plugin link; installed the plugin, and used it right away.

The result? I had started with about 135 “categories.” (These were the original labels that I used in the Google Blogger.) Within a few minutes, I moved 90 of those “categories” over into being “tags.”

Whew! What a difference. I’m now down to “only” 45 categories; still way too many. But this – at least – is manageable. Over the next week, I’ll be going through and thinking about what goes where. What is a “parent,” and what is a “child.” How to organize and name these things so that they’re findable – both by myself and others.

Here’s the result of this first pass.

Step 1, Part 1: The First Pass in Cleaning Out the Categories

An extract from the newly-revised categories is (once again) on the right.

You can immediately see several key differences:

1. The book titles, personal names, and names of things and events have all been moved out,
2. The remaining categories are all “topical” in nature – not all of them will survive as categories, but now they’re easier to consider.

The number of times that a category has been used (the number in parenthesis to the right of each category) is a good indicator for future decision-making: Is this a one-time thing, or will I be writing about it a lot in the future?

Just glancing at the list brings up a small conundrum – and an example of the kind of problem that we have to solve when designing categories and sub-categories (parent and child categories). I’ll walk you through how I’m solving this in the next blogpost.

Step 1, Part 2: Moving Those Excess Categories into a Tag Cloud

For now, though, one other figure is helpful. We finally have a Tag Cloud, which I’ve labeled “Hot Topics,” available right under the category listing. I show an extract of this to the left.

Just because something is not a “general” search topic – either a parent or a child category – does not mean that it’s not useful.

In fact, by moving all those excess labels into a Tag Cloud, we have an entirely different way of peering into a blog’s content.

Categories and Tags: Left-Brain and Right-Brain Ways of Peering Into Blog Content

It’s that whole “left-brain/right-brain” notion once again.

• Categories are a “left-brain” type of organization – they’re hierarchically organized (parent and child), and they hold the major themes that you decide – upfront – that will be important in your blog.
• Tags are a “right-brain” type of organization – the various specifics that come up as you write towards your general themes.

I particularly like blog tags because they give you the “Aha!” moments – as in, I didn’t realize that I was writing about that topic, or mentioning that book, quite so often.

Tags a good way for you (and others) to see what you’re about; tags are the little things that consistently work their way into your thoughts and your writing.

Step 2: Designing the Parent and Child Categories (A Thought-Exercise)

The “parent” and “child” distinction does show up in the category listings. However, it’s smart to design how and where they show up – so you can guide your reader’s attention. This means that you have to design the parent and child categories yourself, and then use some smart linguistic tricks to give your readers a clue.

It’s worth taking a pen and pad of paper, and noodling this around for a while.

What We’ll Do in the Next Blog Post

If you have a Google Blogger account, and are transitioning to a WordPress-based blog-plus-web combination, you’ll be doing an exercise much like I’m doing now. This is the same exercise that I did several months ago, when I migrated my first Blogger account over to WordPress, and then took on a client, for whom I’ve been moving a Xanga-based blog to WordPress. In each case, categories have needed careful and thoughtful attention – not just to their organization, but to their names.

In the next blog post, I’ll take you “behind the scenes” – I’ll take you through my thought-process as I re-organize this blog’s categories, and build a new tag set as well. At the end, you’ll see how easy the new categories will make it to find what’s needed.

Finding Our Way Out of the Forest

Categories are like well-marked trails and pathways – they help us to navigate our way through the woods!

Until next time –

To your own health, wealth, and wisdom –

Alianna

 

---

P.S. Do you want to follow my process as it evolves? The blog series that I’m using for this exercise is for my book, Unveiling: The Inner Journey. The book was published about two years ago, and I developed the blog series before publication – so there are now over 100 blog posts, most developing the thoughts that I originally expressed in the book. Have a look at The Unveiling Journey, which is the new home for both the Unveiling blog and its associated website; both still in progress.

Revisit that blog every week or so – not just to see the new blog content, but to observe how the blog category-and-tag reorganization project is coming along.

It’s a lot like checking out how your neighbors are remodeling their old Victorian home – always interesting to look into someone else’s renovation project!

---

P.P.S. Don’t have a book, but think you might want to?

Start getting your content onto paper (actually, into digital files) by blogging.

Can you see how I’m doing that with the Unveiling blogs? Have a look at that blog series to see how I’m developing new insights about psychological archetypes. Once I have sufficient material, I’ll cull them into a manuscript, and edit and revise – and there will be a new book!

Or, just stay closer to home. Look through this blog series. Do you see the theme on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, applied to internet marketing? That’s another book-in-the-making. Do you see that this blog post, and the previous, address how to use categories and tags to give structure to a blog series? Another book. Maybe a short one, maybe a chapter in a longer one, but this is more unique content.

Do what I’m doing. Use your blogs to get your content onto paper (into a file). This is useful because it helps you to start writing for others, not just yourself. Then, putting the material into a book becomes a much more manageable task.

Best wishes and good luck! – Alianna