Embracing Right Timing

If you’ve been following me closely and hanging on my every word (which of course you have :-) !), you’ll have been disappointed to notice my output has slowed recently. It’s been 10 days since my last post!

The reason for this is that I’ve been busy working on my new book, and I have a deadline for completing it.

As part of my studies for my Diploma in Coaching and Mentoring, I’ve been talking to friends and colleagues about their aspirations, and one of the questions they sometimes ask is, ‘why can’t I achieve my dreams? I’ve wanted this for years and it isn’t happening! What am I doing wrong?’

The answer may simply be that it isn’t time yet. Either there’s knowledge, wisdom or growth needed before you can or should achieve your dream - would you, for instance, want to become a mother before your mental health has improved enough that you can be the mother you really want to be? - or it simply isn’t time for your dream to come to fruition yet.

As an illustration of this, here’s the story of my book.

For the last ten years, I’ve always spent November frantically writing, uploading my daily word count to the NaNoWriMo website. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an annual challenge, accepted by thousands of writers every year, to write 50,000 words in the month of November. If you complete the challenge, you’re a winner. I’ve won NaNaNoWriMo eleven times! Sadly, it seems that financial woes have hit the team and there won’t be another NaNo, but it’s likely that thousands of writers will still be scribbling frantically this November, and tracking their own word count.

I always try to write something every day during NaNo, partly so as not to fall too far behind, and partly because you get a badge for updating your word count every day of the month, though the rest of the year I write as and when. Maybe that’s why I’ll probably be doing NaNo again this year, even without the website to upload to?

But wait - what has this got to do with right timing?

It’s a great question. Sorry, got sidetracked just a little!

I mentioned NaNo because the book I’m working on was a NaNo project to begin with. I had the *brilliant* (of course!) idea to write a collection of short stories, illustrating how people might use crystals to help in their daily lives. My thinking was that I, and probably most people, learn best through stories. There are tons of books out there about crystals, all telling you the wonderful properties they hold, but they don’t always tell you how to access those qualities. I haven’t come across many (or any!) that show you this through story. Everyone I’ve mentioned it to thinks it’s a great idea and can’t wait to read it!

So - timing. I wrote the stories in this book in November 2020. It’s now April 2025. So they’ve been sitting on my hard drive a long time. After all, I’ve self-published three other books in the meantime - my first children’s series, Lindy and the Fairies. Why has it taken so long to get the crystals book out into the world?

Because there was a missing element, and I knew it, but I’ve only recently figured out what it was.

When I started writing the stories, I simply paraphrased the descriptions from Judy Hall’s Crystal Bible, as an introduction to each crystal. I knew I’d have to change that, but I had no idea what to replace it with.

Last year, I saw an article in Writing Magazine about a new independent small press, Crystal Clear Books, and what they were looking for seemed a perfect match for Crystal Tales, as I was calling it. I’d done a fair bit of editing on the stories, so instead of taking weeks to go through them again and get them perfect, I compiled the book from my Scrivener file, wrote a cover letter, and sent it off.

And they loved it! It needed work, there were some plot holes and typos and I’d need to change the crystal intros, but they had an editor I could work with, and I was so excited!

It took months to get to the point of discussing a contract. I rewrote the intros and sent them off just before Christmas, but it was March before I finally received their proposed contract.

It was a lengthy process, but I figured it was just a question of right timing. The book would come out when it was ready, and it would be ready when it was supposed to be. The suggested publication date was March 2026, and I was all set to start working with the editor the very next week.

But the contract had a clause I didn’t like. It stated that copyright in the work would sit with Crystal Clear Books. All the advice I’ve ever been given is, don’t sell your copyright. So I asked if this was negotiable. The reply was a long time coming, and basically said, ‘oh, that isn’t what it means. It means you won’t take the work to another publisher for the duration of the contract. But that’s only two years. It’s fine.’ I said, ‘oh, good. Can we just tweak the wording and I’ll be happy to sign.’

But they wouldn’t. Reading it again, it didn’t say that copyright would revert to me at the end of the contract. I suspect a court of law might have found in their favour, had I ever taken it to one. So I said, no, I wouldn’t be signing that, and we parted company.

Then it occurred to me that there is no copyright in ideas, and that they could, if they were so inclined, ask someone else to write a similar book as competition to mine. So I decided I’d better get it out there as soon as possible, and I’m now busy editing it so I can do just that.

And that’s when the missing ingredient suddenly became clear.

The book is now in the final stages of a major upgrade. I had the stunningly brilliant idea(!) of tying all the disparate stories together by having the main characters attend an evening class to find out more about crystals. The class has the same name as the new title of the book - Crystal Companions - and the tutor, Kitty, has asked each student to name their favourite crystal, so she can teach them more about it.

And as I’ve been writing the classes, I’ve been adding a whole set of exercises and suggested ways to work with crystals going into the book to fill out these classes. That literally never occurred to me until I was actually writing the classes. I still don’t know what’s going into the last three, as I haven’t written them yet!

So the version Crystal Clear Books may still have on their hard drive is a shadow of the one that will be coming out next month. The new version will have about 20,000 extra words, and give twice the value of the old one. And this probably wouldn’t have happened, or at least happened now, if I hadn’t waited for the right time to publish it.

But that meant there was a lot of work to do. It still might have been a couple of months or more before I was ready to publish, except that as I was starting work on the additional text, I had an email from the organisers of the Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival, scheduled for the weekend of 9-11 May 2025. They asked if I’d like to have a table on the Saturday to sell my self-published books. I snapped up that offer, as you can imagine, and then I thought - how great would it be to have a brand new book to sell? Now I’m frantically working to get it finished and edited, create a cover, and order advanced copies, so I can launch it at the festival.

I’m planning on an official publication date of 12 May - full moon, a great moment for completion of a project - so people can buy advanced copies from me on 10 May at my stall, or order over the weekend. I’m hoping those orders will bump up the sales figures on publication day, making the book more visible on Amazon to others who might want to buy it.

So a book I drafted in 2020 will finally see the light in 2025, four and a half years later. It’ll be bigger and better than I ever imagined, and it’ll have its debut outing at a festival celebrating all things ‘writing’. Sometimes dreams come with a ‘right moment’ that we aren’t aware of until it happens, and that seems to be the case for Crystal Companions.

That’s what I call ‘right timing’! You’re welcome to wish me luck, but I have a feeling it’s going to do well anyway.