Welcome!

This is your home, your hub, your playspace—the Sandbox where you can develop your book. And if you’re really showing up to it, it’s where working on your book will develop you too.

I wanted to call this page an overview, but it can really only be a preview of what’s possible. The reason I don’t just give it away as a template is because it’s not one. If you followed it step by step, all by yourself, with no context or support or guidance or perspective, you wouldn’t get what you need out of it.

This is a space, and all spaces are affected by the way we show up to them. (Think: A pool in a luxury hotel with a no-kids policy vs that same pool hosting a ten year old’s birthday.)

We’re all showing up with our own levels of “done,” our own preconceived notions, our own baggage, our own strengths, our own weaknesses. So I’m only opening the door to this space when I can introduce you to it, show you around, and help you use it without drowning.

That means your Intensive session (standalone or to kick off a deeper level of collaboration) already told you exactly where to go play in the Sandbox so you know the most effective path forward.

But I didn’t delete or hide the rest of the steps and stages. They’re still there for two really important reasons:

1. You should be able to see where you’ve been and where you’re going. You don’t need to rely on me to reassure you that you are moving in the right direction or that staying focused on one thing is building toward the other things. Your space should reflect that progress for you.
2. You should be free to move in and out of whatever you have access to in a given session. You don’t need to wait for me to give you clearance. If you’ve been working on one step but need the clarity of another, or the extra refinement of something else, and you want to go explore—who am I to stop you? Your space should facilitate that progress for you.

Here’s the thing, the writing world tends to set up in one of two camps: creating a book is a fully intuitive process that gets discovered anew every single time or it’s **a rigid, templated process that (if we’d only just follow it!) would make everything so much easier.

As an unschooling, Montessori-minded, teach-you-to-grow-your-own-authority kind of person, you can guess which side I tend to fall on.

But binaries are often false, and this is no exception.

Part of becoming an author is learning to trust your own authority and instincts (intuitive). Part of it is understanding the medium of “book” and how it comes together (process).

Until I could find something that made room for one without discouraging or destroying the other, I resisted anything that looked like a system, template, or process tool.

After years spent in and out of all aspects of the industry, I still hadn’t found a space that made room for the real development process. So, I built it.

Example of a Purple Sandbox—customized to speak to your book type, hold your intentions, and be the kind of space you want to return to for the many hours you’ll be in this project.

What’s Different about This Space

A Little More about Me