Sunday 22 May 2011

Finally - the E-book

Yes, my e-book, Escape your profession and save your life, is now up and available on Smashwords.  Just click on http://smashwords.com/b/60859 . Escape your profession is written for those busy and stressed out professionals who feel trapped and really want to find a way to escape. Unfortunately for all professionals it is too easy to become trapped by your own success and competence at what you do. Relying on the good income that comes with a busy and successful professional life is part of the velvet handcuffs that tie you to your profession too.

However, you only get one shot at life and it is too short to spend all of it in the office working under great pressure and for long family-unfriendly hours. If you have dreamed of or ever thought of throwing it all in for something that is more satifsying and will give you a better lifestyle then Escape your profession and save your life was written with you in mind.  The book offers many suggestions, tips and ideas about how to plan and make that escape.

I never intended to write a book when I started escaping my profession about eight years ago but so many people have asked me over the years how I managed to do it that a book seemed like a good idea.  I am firmly convinced that one of the saddest sights in life is to see intelligent, well educated men and women, who are really good at what they do, who have convinced themselves that they can not do something different or change their circumstances.

You owe it to yourself and your family to make the most of your life and to live it joyously and to the full.

Sunday 15 May 2011

This almost writing life

It's the start of another week in the life of the full-time writer.  A storm threatens, coming straight from Antarctica according to the weather forecasters, and it seems a good day to closet one's self in the study and write.  However, instead the full-time writer manages to spend the morning mowing the lawns before the rain arrives, hanging out and later bringing in the day's laundry, washing the breakfast dishes and then preparing lunch for the return of the beloved wife.  Writing undertaken zilch - rise in 'domestic God' status stakes considerable.  Somehow I'm sure famous writers are just that - writers, not would be domestic Gods.  I'm doing something wrong.

It's not that I suffer from writer's block it is just that I have well-developed procrastination skills honed during a far too long legal career. Actually I suffer from being computer gun shy, if there is such a condition.  I am a reasonably competent word processor but ask me to move outside my basic comfit zone on the computer and I freeze.  Getting this blog to its current very basic state has been a life changing experience for a man in his 60s.  I now have to put the e-book up on Smashwords.  It is supposed to be idiot proof, if you follow the clear instructions they provide.

Unfortunately, I have that dark gut feeling of despair that comes from experience that tells me that somewhere in the process I will come across a step that is beyond my capabilities.  That is why there is such comfit in firing up the battered twenty year old lawnmower (do those Briggs & Stratton motors really run forever) and mowing the grass.  I can cope with the technology, even if the only way I can stop the damn thing is by knocking off the spark plug lead with a stick.  There is a fortune to be made by anyone who finds a way to solve computer problems by poking the VDU with a small stick!