The Miracle of How a Book Wrote Itself

 I just wrote a book titled Idea Engineering: Creative Thinking and Innovation. Yes, you are probably just as surprised as I am. The real surprise is not that I wrote a book, but how the book got written.

Because of the research I had done as a professor, I was approached by a publishing company in New York to write a book about creative thinking and innovation for engineers and technologists. They wanted me to organize some of my prior research on the topic and said the book could practically write itself. LOL. That would be a fairly easy feat B.C. (before cancer).

I paused. One of the things that happens when faced with the Grim Reaper poking at you is that you think about your bucket list and your legacy and what you will leave behind. Will anyone remember you? Will your life have counted for something good in this world? I decided to take the chance.

I said that I was not interested unless I could put my own spin on it. I wanted to add personal anecdotes so that the book could be read by people outside of the academic realm. I wanted to add some of “life according to Dr. La Verne” moments.

Privately I explained to the editor that I had been diagnosed with cancer and had entered a clinical trial. I was dealing with some side effects, but I believed that the process would be a wonderful diversion from thinking about leukemia. He was willing to take a chance.

I gathered my research and then started organizing it and rewriting it. I thank God every day that I could write this book at my pace and my way. Some days I could not do anything. I was fatigued. Some days were good and then I would have to pay for it later. Some days I could only sit for short amounts of time on the computer, because of my spinal stenosis. So some days I worked on the computer, then got up and walked around the room. Then I was horizontal in bed and read a little, then sat back down at the computer, then took a nap. The entire process was exhausting.

The interesting parts of the journey were the times I began to get the symptoms of chemo brain (Refer to my past posting). I couldn’t remember what I had done or not done on the manuscript. I know this must sound horrific to most people, but because my demented sense of humor saves me, I found it quite amusing. I would reread parts of the manuscript and say to myself, “ Wow! This is great! Did I actually write this?” Then there were days I would read what I had written and say, “This is crap! What on earth was I thinking? This doesn’t even make any sense at all!” Then I would trash it.

On a few occasions I couldn’t remember where I put my handwritten notes. “Well, you old senile bat,” I would say to myself, “Time to do something else.” Then I would meditate for a while, do something else on my list, and try again another day.

The process continued throughout all the feedback from my reviewers and the copy editors. I wish I had a fast-speed version of me. It would have made great entertainment on YouTube.com.

So now the book is being printed. It is available from Amazon.com, as well as the publisher’s website momentumpress.net. It truly is a miracle that the book got finished. Somehow it must have written itself.