I’ve been watching with growing dismay as the headlines about the euro crisis grow steadily more dire. The economics blogs I follow are predicting years of stagnation in Europe as a best case scenario for the resolution of the crisis. Their worst case scenarios include widespread economic depression and misery, blood in the streets, and even the rise of right-wing nationalism.

As I clicked through to the blogs this morning, I found myself wondering, what is it that has drawn me away from my love of personal story — stories of the real everyday lives of ordinary people — to this impersonal story dominated by political maneuverings, shaky bank balance sheets and  apocalyptic headlines? The answer of course is that the economic realities of our time are the backdrop to everything that happens in our lives. And at the same time, it is the day to day decisions we each make that when added together create the economy we live in. The economy and the stories we tell are two sides of the same coin.

Economist Steven Keen, interviewed on the BBC in November reminded us that it was in the midst of the economic blight in Germany at the end of WWI that Hitler came to power. Germany was bankrupted and humiliated by the war reparations it was forced to pay after the war and the German people were suffering. A forceful leader came forward promising relief from the hardship and a restoration of national pride. The economic situation was the backdrop to the story of Hitler’s rise, which became in turn the backdrop to millions of individual stories of personal horrors — of families destroyed, loved ones murdered, forced labor, exile, cities devastated, livelihoods lost — until the end of WWII.

In our own time, powerful players in Europe are making decisions about  whether or not to buy the bonds of struggling countries and their bankrupt banks. They are forcing the politicians of the smaller weaker countries to abandon their social safety nets and leave the poor to fend for themselves. They are turning a blind eye while youth unemployment reaches 50% in Spain and riots and protests threaten to squash what little life is left in the economies of the Mediterranean countries. People in Greece are living off the last of their savings, wondering what will happen when that’s gone while German politicians gripe about lazy Greeks and demand ever greater austerity. With this economic devastation and political divisiveness as a backdrop, who can tell what kind of ideological perversities will emerge?

Ordinary people buying homes, starting families, choosing where and how to spend their money, running businesses, sending their kids to school — the small stories of all these decisions, large and small, feed into the kind of economy we have. Economists, imagining that what they do is hard science, take just the data from all those decisions, transactions and contracts and use them to draw up theories about how the economy works. Thinking that the messy details of real people’s lives are irrelevant, they pull a curtain down over the misery of unemployment and the heartache of losing a home to foreclosure and focus only on the numbers. They recommend to their government an interest rate drop here or some quantitative easing there. But their solutions cannot make the economy work for ordinary people as long as they close their ears to the stories.

While editing a collection of food stories and related recipes* in 2007, one of my favorite stories was “No More Parsnips.” Back in the Depression years of the 1930s, the author’s mother Betty had sent her new husband George out food shopping with the last $2 of the young couple’s savings and he’d come home with nothing but a bushel of parsnips. The story of how they lived for weeks on a diet of parsnips—baked, boiled, roasted, and stewed—became a family legend.

For those of us who are comfortably off, there is a sweet nostalgia to the story, above all because we know that Betty and her children survived their ordeal and have chosen to focus on the humor of an otherwise dreadful situation.

Right this minute, there are millions of families living out a similar scene of desperation and food insecurity. Some may eventually find the humor in their ordeal. Others will be crushed by it. Some will lose everything, including loved ones and their own lives to sickness brought on by an inadequate diet or to homelessness or mental illness. These are the stories that are being pointed to on wearethe99percent.tumblr.com. These are the stories behind the economists’ data.

So yes, I read the economics blogs. But I have not forgotten that behind every cross on the graph or percentage point in a table are real people living real lives.

* Kitchen Table Stories, Ed. M Jane Ross, published by Story Circle Network.

Bronze sculpture of writer Antonio Callado looks out over Leblon beach, RJ

Fast forward 20 years. Brazil has had a remarkable turnaround. There is political stability; economic growth plus social policies to aid the poor have lifted all boats. The mood of the country as a whole is exuberant. We’ve been on sabbatical here for 3 months now and the general optimism and increasing prosperity in all social classes are palpable. Twenty years ago, the maid who worked for my mother-in-law was illiterate and her home was a tiny fume-filled room in a basement garage. Now, my weekly cleaner has a computer and lives in a condominium with playgrounds and safe streets for her son to play in.

But now I look north towards the US and wonder what went wrong, as I watch the country that’s been my home for nearly 20 years caught in banana-republic political chaos over the debt ceiling and economic decline that used to be the province of developing tropical countries.

Being here in Brazil brings a strange déjà vu and at the same time an opportunity to reflect on change: how both Brazil and the US have changed; how I have changed. It’s an opportunity also to notice how I react in the same way now that I did back then to the events around me. And to notice the ways I react differently, for example, to watching the US in decline.

I have long been a disaster news junky. And the recent impasse in the US Congress over the debt ceiling felt like watching another slow-motion train wreck. But here’s what’s new. After two weeks of frantically following economics and politics blogs, desperate for news of a resolution and a rescue, feeling my blood pressure rise ever higher the more I read, I reached a point where I had run out of adrenaline and the inclination to hear any more about this entirely man-made fiasco. I found myself wondering, if there were a blog that gave a more philosophical take on the news headlines, that looked at current events with the eye of wisdom and took the long view, what would it be saying right now? And, is it possible that I could find within myself that long, wise view that I long for in the outside world, find my own comfort and wisdom in the midst of crisis?

Lifewriting allows us a space and a forum to look at the inner events that occur in response to the outer, to notice our own reactions, and reach for our own wisdom. And in that exploration, we find a sense of an inner family, representing the many parts of our personality, that knows how to pull together so that the parts support each other in a shared endeavor that goes far beyond defensiveness. So how will my own internal family pull together, this time around?

A good writing prompt evokes our past by activating memories, first of smells, sounds, sights, and emotions. Once those memories start to stir in our consciousness, the prompt should guide us towards the specifics of the memory and encourage us to notice and record the sense memories that arise and the stories that go with them.

Working with a group of eight to ten senior women during eight years, each month I brought a new writing prompt to our group. The results were extraordinary! Over those eight years, three of our group completed a collection of their stories that they had begun in our class and went on to self-publish them as a book aimed at friends and family members.

My goal now is to collect the writing prompts together into my own self-published book so that more senior women can experience the joys of lifewriting. I’ll post news of progress here as it happens.

(You can read more about the writing circle here. During 2011, I am on sabbatical overseas. The circle decided that they were ready to take over facilitating their own meetings, so members now share the job of bringing a writing prompt to the monthly meetings.)

Hand picture credit: © Wolfgang Kraus | Dreamstime.com

I’ve been reading Gated Grief by fellow Austinite, university English professor and friend Leila Levinson. Ultimately it’s a warmly reassuring read, even as it’s far from being a easy one — the subtitle is “The Daughter of a GI Liberator Faces Her Inheritance of Trauma.”

Leila explores the hidden trauma experienced by the families (including her own) of WWII veterans who liberated the hellish concentration camps of Nazi Germany. In her prologue, Leila imagines what her father must have experienced as one of the liberators of concentration camp survivors near Nordhausen in Germany.  The retelling is made eerier by her skillful use of the second person, “you,” in place of “he” or “I.”

Leila Levinson

In her research for the book, Leila noted how the veterans she interviewed often switched to using the second person “you” as they talked of their experiences. Their memories of arriving into the camps, even looking back 60+ years on those events, were still so raw and traumatic that the men seemed to need to find a way to step outside those memories by avoiding speaking of “I.”

“…you don’t know what skin and bones are until you see some of these people.”

“You just couldn’t believe it.”

“You were so affected by this…”

In my earlier post about being in New Zealand during the February 22 earthquake, I tried this way of writing for myself. For the writer, it provides a distance from the events of the story that make it possible to revisit painful memories. The effect for the reader is surprising. As one reads, one has a sense both of being there in the writer’s shoes and at the same time of listening to a story of someone who has had to dissociate themselves from their own experience in order to survive and function in the normal world.

Try this yourself. Begin by writing a piece about a small, perhaps scary incident from your childhood using the second person, “you.” Notice the way you feel as you write. Notice how it sounds to read the story aloud. As you gain confidence, try this way of writing about other more difficult periods of your life. You may find that using the second person frees you from the anxiety that often accompanies writing about difficult times.

I hope to interview Leila over the coming months to find out more about how her journey to understand her own family’s story led to deep healing and how the healing process can work for other survivors and children of survivors.

920 O'Farrell Street

Take a look at the book covers for two recent books of lifewriting. Both books are listed on print-on-demand service Lulu.com. 920 O’Farrell Street is published through a traditional independent publishing house. (Many mainstream book publishers now put their entire backlist on Lulu.com or other similar print-on-demand services.) The Daily Log of a WWII B-24 Pilot is a self-published book — or at least, it sure looks like a self-published book.

Good cover design works to convey the contents of the book in a mixture of visuals and type that will make the reader want to find out more. Let’s compare the type design, illustrations, and color palette of the two covers to see why the design of 920 O’Farrell Street tells you this is a mainstream publication with a professionally designed cover while the Daily Log cover shouts “self-published.”

Type design

Daily Log of a WWII B-24 Pilot

The title of 920 O’Farrell Street evokes the time period of the story by skillfully mimicking the type design of the late 1800s. It suggests the viewer / potential reader can expect to be transported back in time by this story.

Notice, by contrast, that the title of Daily Log is in all capitals and all the letters and words are of the same weight (i.e., same size and font), making it look like it could be the title of a boring government report. I’m sure the contents are gripping, but you might not think so from the title and the way it is laid out.

Choice and Layout of Photos

Both covers include a photograph of the book’s subject. The size and placement of the portrait on 920 O’Farrell Street makes the penetrating gaze of Miss Harriet Lane Levy arresting and intriguing. We want to get to know her.

By contrast, the face of 2nd Lt. Harrison is small and difficult to see. Harrison, in the plane’s cockpit, looks like he’s just landed from a pleasure trip, though the B-24s he piloted were heavy bombers. There’s a subtle disconnect between the photo and the book’s subject matter.

Color Palette

The two covers use a similar color palette but to very different effect. The colors of 920 O’Farrell Street mimic old paper and faded sepia photographs, with a touch of gold. Again the designer has evoked the time period beautifully and subtly, using an old photograph of San Francisco in faded colors to create texture and depth in the lower half of the cover and to set the scene.

The plain beige background of Daily Log just looks bland. It says nothing about the spaciousness that a pilot might feel surrounded by blue sky, or the drama and tragedy of war, or the fear invoked by flying into an ambush of enemy fighters. Sadly, the author has missed an opportunity to use the background to set the mood of the story.

Cover design is as complex a subject as clothing design. But one thing is clear. It’s worth seeking input from someone who understands effective design to help make your book look professional and ensure that potential readers feel moved to learn more about your story.

In a future blog post we’ll look at the many layers — background, type and images — that together make up a book cover design.

The two books whose covers I’ve compared can be found on Lulu.com here and here.

You have sabbatical year ahead of you with ample time for writing. You’ve found the perfect place to stay on a quiet street, with a writing table near an upper-story window overlooking a Japanese maple tree. You’ve settled into a routine of writing in the mornings.

Historic neo-Gothic buildings were hard hit by the earthquake

Then the unexpected hits in the form of an earthquake that shatters the city. Power is out. Water too. Roads are awash in silt or torn apart by cracks and potholes. Across town, people are dead or dying. Homes are ruined. Familiar landmarks are destroyed.

You struggle to find ways to help, ways to make the effort of getting up in the morning mean something. You battle the recurring anxiety of frequent aftershocks.

Services are restored to your neighborhood, which came through mostly unscathed. Power is back. The internet too. Friends from far away want to know if you’re alright, want news. You turn to Facebook, posting daily updates on what you’re doing, what you’ve seen. It helps. You feel an urgency to the writing, knowing there are friends and family members anxious to read your report. You are writing but it’s not what you planned. Because what you planned seems too far from the day to day gritty reality of what-needs-to-be-done-right-now. Your writing, for now, needs to stay in the moment.

This was the first few months of our sabbatical year. On February 22, a devastating earthquake destroyed the center and eastern suburbs of the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.

It isn’t what I’d planned, but what I’m forced to do now is this: to search for the lessons — life lessons, and lessons on story and healing — in the aftermath of the quake.

Jenny’s memoir is self published through Lulu.com, with layout, cover design, photo preparation, and publishing coordination by Jane Ross of MJR Publishing Services.

Reading the news about the devastation and talking to family in New Zealand, I remembered my conversation with Buddhist writer Barbara Gates captured in the wake of the Asian tsunami of December 2004 in this interview. Barbara Gates is the author of an acclaimed memoir, Already Home.

Dawn sky seen from the window of my childhood home | MJ Ross

Barbara Gates: For much of my life, I’ve lacked a sense of home. My parents split up when I was four, and I shuttled back and forth between my New York City artist mom and my New England professor dad; I never felt settled in either home. As I see it now, much of the trajectory of my life—both relationships and work—has been fueled by a passion to reverse a sense of homelessness. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sought a sense of home in joining with other teachers to found and run a community school. But in the wake of my dad’s death from cancer, I had a tantrum with everyone close to me, destroying the fragile beginnings of home with my boyfriend and with the teachers with whom I was creating a community. I left Cambridge for Berkeley on the run. I gradually began to settle into life on the other side of the continent in an unfamiliar place.

It wasn’t until a crisis—grappling with breast cancer and facing my own mortality—that I began my unconventional pilgrimage to explore the terrain right where I was. Through daily walks, research, imagination, and meditation practice, I became intimate with my home place—inner and outer.

JR: You share a sense of home with communities of writers and of Buddhists. How did you find these vocational and spiritual homes?

BG: As far back as I can remember, telling stories and writing have been vehicles for me to tap into what I think and feel, to heal what feels broken. I have developed kinships with others through writing—as I edited my high school newspaper and the Bennington College literary magazine, co-wrote a book about teaching women’s studies and, for the past twenty plus years, co-edited the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. Some of my most tender intimations of home have arisen as a co-founder, co-editor, co-writer, through a creative back-and-forth with other writers exploring the nuances of words, images, and sentence rhythms.

Buddhism was the first spiritual tradition to which I was drawn. Raised alternately by my agnostic Jewish mother and my atheistic once-Unitarian father, I hadn’t found “home” in either temple or church. When I was in my twenties, my friend Jonny Kabat (later to become Jon Kabat Zinn) taught me to meditate. On his way to lead the early morning sitting at the Cambridge Zen Center, he dropped by my communal house to sit with me. When my dad died and my life seemed to fall apart, I began to turn towards a committed meditation practice. I went to Naropa Institute in Colorado to study vipassana meditation with Joseph Goldstein. Since then I’ve found some community with other meditators, particularly, with Wes “Scoop” Nisker and my other Inquiring Mind colleagues. But it has been through Buddhist practice itself—through learning to settle into the present moment—that I have truly accessed a sense of home.

JR: Your book, Already Home, grew out of seven years of journaling, reflection and research as you sought to understand deeply the meaning of home. At what point did you become aware that your work would result in a book and that others might be inspired by your journey to explore these questions for themselves?

BG: For many years, my column in Inquiring Mind explored Buddhist themes through stories of daily life. In response, readers sometimes wrote to tell me how moved they were by my stories and reflections. Some suggested I should write a book. After the cancer diagnosis, the writing I was doing became an essential practice for me. I felt as though I was writing for my life. My friends, Joanna Macy and Wendy Johnson (both Buddhist teachers and deep ecologists), asked me to join with them to form a three-woman book writing support group. “You’re writing a book aren’t you?” asked Joanna. It seemed I was! As the group read though all of my columns, we saw common themes: family, neighborhood, and community. These became the basis for the book.

JR: Once you had decided to write a book, how did the book evolve?

BG: When I first started writing, I hadn’t yet conceptualized the theme of “home.” As I wrote about the terror of dying young and of leaving behind a motherless five-year-old, I began to see how out of synch I felt with myself and the world. I sought connection with the streets of my neighborhood, with human neighbors, with other animals and growing things. So I broadened my attention beyond “woe is me” to the healing of the terrain and I broadened my sense of mortality to include the vast impermanence of evolving life. Gradually, I recognized my own longing for belonging. I saw that I was writing about home.

When I wrote a chapter, I usually began with a resonant image, something I’d seen or experienced which called to me. I didn’t know where it would lead. Take my relationship with Dee, the homeless woman who used to sleep in our family car. It wasn’t until I wrote a number of stories about Dee that I saw her pain and violence in myself and I saw my own feelings of homelessness. Through that writing, something began to heal for me and I recognized a common human yearning to be embraced in safety and forgiveness. So this writing offered me insight into myself, into Dee, and into all who are subject to the uncertainties of life.

JR: For me, one of the most beautiful aspects of Already Home is the straight forwardness of the language you use and the naturalness with which you connect Buddhist philosophy with down-to-earth experience. How did you come to write in this way?

BG: I’ve always wanted to open up possibility for those who might ordinarily be shut out. In the 1970s I was a cofounder and staff member in a school for low-income kids who dropped out of the public system. I hoped to offer them experiences in learning and self-governance that they probably would never have had. Likewise, I’ve wanted to offer insights gleaned from Buddhism to those who might not have access to them otherwise. After all, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike experience disconnection from themselves and their world. So, in the hope of passing on the teachings to those who might not be comfortable with Buddhist terminology, I’ve told stories instead of preaching philosophy.

Here’s an example. I tell a story of an adventure I had with my just-skunked dog, Cleo, in the back of a pickup truck swerving down a winding road. Responding to Cleo’s terror when she careened back and forth, I found myself embracing her, anchoring the two of us amid tumbling shovels and ropes. In that hug, skunk stink alchemized into gamy life stink. Following this incident, I coined the term “skunk practice.” This became a metaphor for me of a way of fully living life, of embracing what seemed unembraceable, including heartache and loss. It’s a version of Buddhist mindfulness practice.

JR: Already Home woke me up to many aspects of my neighborhood and community that I had paid little attention to in the past. Have you received a similar response from other readers? Is the book changing the way people view their home environments?

BG: Many readers have told me that the book led them to realize that didn’t know the names of their neighbors or much about their home places—where their water came from, whether there were toxic chemicals in their local air or ground water. Readers from far-away places—from Israel to British Columbia, from New Zealand and France—have started writing and photography projects in their neighborhoods. Others have investigated remains of native settlements that preceded them in their home places. Still others have begun to notice their inner terrain and to try out meditation.

JR: What suggestions would you make for other life-writers who might be interested in exploring their own understanding of home and using this as a catalyst to deepen their writing?

BG: I suggest carrying a little back-pocket notebook as you take walks through your neighborhood. Scribble observations—scents, colors, textures, lists of debris, vegetation, graffiti—as well as unexpected images, memories and insights as they arise. Later, copy those into journals. At another time, read them through and circle favorite details, phrasings, metaphors, new understandings. When you are ready to write, draw on these treasures. Often you will rediscover observations, even musical language, that you didn’t even remember you had scribbled down—rich fodder for your explorations of home.

JR: In the wake of the tsunami that struck in December 2004, I know that you have been reflecting on the scale of homelessness in Southeast Asia. What can the tsunami teach us about the idea of home and the solidity that we give to this idea?

BG: For many, a sense of home is strongly identified with a yearning for stability and security. But an understanding of the nature of home can be radically informed by reflections on the vast impermanence of the natural world, epitomized by the recent tsunami. Awareness of the ongoing evolution of things—the perspective of vast shifting time and space—is essential to insight into who or what we are and our place in the world. As devastating as tectonic violence can be to human life, the constant recycling of the earth’s crust makes for rich soil, allows for a lush and habitable planet. Powerful jolts, such as the one that led to the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 may be the heartbeat of the earth, perhaps essential to the evolution of complex life (our planet’s first organisms having probably arisen in the deep sea alongside volcanic gashes).

Throughout Already Home, I have juxtaposed small personal events (such as my own confrontation with mortality through breast cancer) with the vast impersonal evolution of the place and its inhabitants. I begin the book by evoking the movement of tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault slowly tearing apart California. From a Buddhist point of view, the evolving elements are operating according to the impersonal laws of cause and effect. Earthquakes and volcanoes, hurricanes and tornadoes are happening all the time as the planet evolves—leaving individual lives inherently insecure and unpredictable. What is important is our response. We need to train ourselves to respond with wisdom and compassion. Home might be seen not so much as a place but as a way of relating to pervasive and ongoing change.

JR: In this world there are many indigent people living on the street and many others who, though they have places to live, still suffer from feelings of “not being at home.” What is the key to our feeling at home?

BG: I suggest two intersecting journeys: 1) Get to know the folks next door, the local ecology and its history, see that who you are and where you are cannot be separated. 2) Through meditation—train your awareness to open to the inner terrain of body and mind. A true sense of home cannot be found in a house or, for that matter, any “thing” subject to vicissitudes of shifting winds or shifting earth. You may not be able to control whether your family stays together or whether your house is stable. But you can train the mind to be stable, to include whatever comes your way. Such stability and inclusiveness of the mind is essential to the recognition that you are already home, that you have been home all along.

—Email interview conducted and edited by Jane Ross. Interview first appeared in the March 2005 issue of the Story Circle Journal.

A chapter from Already Home was included in The Best Buddhist Writing 2004 (Shambhala, 2004).

Here’s a mistake I’ve noticed some writers making: using a statistic like “99%” to mean “the overwhelming majority, in my subjective experience.” Statistics like percentages and averages are viewed as facts by most readers because they seem scientific, leading readers to assume that they’re independently verifiable — that, if we’re given the data set that someone else used to calculate a statistic, and we do the math correctly, we’ll come up with the same number.

When you’re writing, it’s important not to mislead your audience by presenting something as a provable, scientific fact without any evidence. You can say “in my experience, 99%…” but that implies that you came up with that statistic by doing some math, not just a making a guess based on what you remember (especially since people have a demonstrated tendency to forget experiences that contradict their beliefs).

This becomes a real problem when you start mixing “99%” as an expression into a piece that also contains real statistics from real research. It’s confusing! Your audience has to stop and second-guess whether you literally mean 99 times out of 100, or just “the overwhelming majority of the time.” So, to anyone who regularly quotes statistics, I’m suggesting: find a different way to get your point across. You can still be hyperbolic—I think hyperbole is the best thing ever—but use a phrase like “almost always” so your audience can tell.

I honestly can’t think of a context in which using 99% as an expression is the best choice. Good alternatives are: “the overwhelming majority” and “almost always.” You can also try “usually,” “most,” “more,” “every day,” or “often.”

If you aren’t a technical writer, ask yourself why you’re going for a percentage at all — your topic is so much more than dry statistics. If you are a technical writer, is using this expression really worth the confusion it creates? I know I’ve been guilty of this mistake, and it may be hard to break the habit completely. As a first step, try using the context to make it clear that you don’t literally mean 99% by prefacing it with “it seems like” or another qualifying word or phrase.

I don’t have a problem with this in casual settings, although I try not to do it myself. Thinking about it, it’s actually a similar problem to writers using the word “literally” when they don’t literally mean “literally.” Sometimes it’s possible to tell that it’s hyperbole. (“I literally eat like a bird.” No, you don’t. I hope.) But sometimes it isn’t. (“I’m literally jumping for joy.” Some people actually do that. But are you really doing that?)

If you’re trying to get a point across, it’s important that you don’t confuse your audience, especially when there are so many easy fixes. I’ve suggested a few of them. How sure am I that they’ll make your writing better? Very.

Word of the Day: Hyperbole

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines hyperbole as: extravagant exaggeration (as “mile-high ice-cream cones”)

Sofia is a freelance editor based in Vancouver, Canada, and just happens to be the daughter of MJR Publishing Services principal, Jane Ross.

Graphic: © Pei Ling Hoo | Dreamstime.com

Spend some time visualizing your book and its audience(s). The following questions will help you brainstorm what you would like your book to look like and to achieve:

© Auremar | Dreamstime.com

• Can I picture a typical reader of my book? Who are they? What has brought them to my book? (These folks are your primary audience.)

• What do I hope this typical reader will take away from reading my book? What will they have learned? What will they feel?

• How do I envisage my book looking as that reader reads it? (How many pages is it? What size? Hardback or paperback? Illustrated or not?)

• Are there other types of people who would read my book? Who are these other (secondary) audiences?

• What would they be looking for from the book?

• Would the book need to be presented differently to appeal to them?

• What about me as the author? If I create the kind of book that I think my primary audience is looking for, will it satisfy me personally, or am I looking for something else from the experience of holding and reading my own book?

• If the book I’d like to create for myself is different from what I think other people are looking for, how do I envisage the book that I personally would like to read, if price were not a limiting factor?

• Finally, what is my main goal for my book? Is it:

• To reach as many people as possible with my story?
• Or to make money from my project, either from book sales or indirectly by establishing me as an authority and consultant?
• Or to create a sublime work of art that would be treated as a treasure?
• Or a combination of these goals?

Write down your answers and refer to them often as you plan your self-publishing project. They will help guide your decisions.