Before: unfinished manuscript stuffed in a shoebox.
After: ready to write, baby.

If you're crafting a story for you or your brand, this is the first of several posts chronicling my broken path to writing "9 Candles" in real time – so you can get your story out there and change the world.

Here goes . . .

I'm slow. In general. On everything. I learned something four years ago that just popped up on my radar like Chippy's brown, golf ball head amongst my 100-year-old, pinkish roses.

I humbly served as the developmental editor on a book for my friend Erin Minckley. She wrote "Artists Who Thrive," (crazy fabulous book!) and is founder of Relativity Textiles, a custom wallpaper company uniting global cultures through pattern and art.

Erin had a chapter on physical space. Clean it up, she said. Get it organized. Make it inspiring. You can't create well/easily/wondrously/imaginatively in chaos.

The pillars of my writing studio have been built on piles of books, tattered folders used 10x over, plastic Filofaxes and, yes, SHOEBOXES.

One said shoebox held my book of short stories (or novelettes – I'm not sure which 🙄 – some of them are over 10,000 words!!) since 2019.

Writing is life. You either do it or you don't. But if you don't, you need to stop talking about it.

And that's the rub. I was talking about a book I wasn't nourishing. It felt fraud-y.

My daughter Katherine Burke, MBA, who's renovating my studio, said definitively, "Mom, this shoebox has to go." Good thing my kids are smarter than me. There's HOPE!!!

We chose plexiglass. I like to see creativity. I like to touch it. Same goes for client work. It's visceral. Sumptuous pieces of paper, a scant thought jotted down on the train, an outline for a piece in the margin of meeting notes, a brand voice chart on the desk ready for words to bend toward it . . . bliss.

Take note: if you're working on your brand or writing a book or creating a dream of another kind, organize the journey. Keep it close. Make it real. Name it. Give it a beautiful space in which to thrive.

Full confession: I still need file folders. I'm thinking pink to match the walls yet to be painted. What do you think? Big news: I worked on "9 Candles" for two hours this morning. Organizing clarified the steps.

It only took me four years to get my mojo going.

I'll show you a little writer's hack that kept me ironclad committed to this morning's date with my book in another post. The world needs your story.

Erin Minckley, if I never said it: grazie.