Xenia Steered the Boat: Thoughts on Writing is a collection of twenty-eight of my blogs from Much to Write About. In this collection I cover topics such as how my favorite childhood song, "The Strawberry Roan," led me to become a writer . . . how my love affair with dairy cows led to my writing poetry . . . my belief that books should have strong, recognizable, appealing settings . . . a history of bears in literature . . . character names . . . sentences and train wrecks . . . and writing my first novel.
To read a sample essay from Xenia Steered the Boat, click on My Kingdom for a Cow.
Xenia Steered the Boat: Thoughts on Writing is a book that didn't exist as a book until I was desperate. Each of the blog pieces within the book is available online, for free. So why would I publish a book if the pieces are floating out there on the internet?
Enter classes and presentations. Since 2010, when I first ventured into self-publishing, I've been giving presentations titled "How to Self-Publish at No Cost on CreateSpace."For all these years, I've shown the CreateSpace steps and how I followed them, updating my presentation each year to keep up with changes in the CreateSpace process.
But: I make my own templates, paste my manuscript into them, and submit them to CreateSpace. This gives me more control over the finished product.
Most people do not want to make their own templates. They want to use the downloadable CreateSpace template (which wasn't available back in 2010, when I first started self-publishing). So, I thought, I would be giving students a better understanding of the process if I actually downloaded a CreateSpace template and published a book using that template.
Except: I had no book ready to publish.
That's when I realized that I had over seventy blogs, most of them on writing. Why not select some of those blogs, put them together in book format, download a CreateSpace teample, and self-publish the result?
And that's how Xenia Steered the Boat: Thoughts on Writing, came to be.