Hey there!

First, I'd like to thank you for signing up to follow along as I play with the new book. It's the first time I've done this, so there's a whole lot of playing here, too. I'm glad you're here with me while we figure it out...

So, this is the cover, with the title I've finally arrived at (after a LOT of back & forth): Something Like Magic.

If you've ever done it, I think you know that making a book is very much a living, breathing process. What made this one a dance even from the beginning was the sheer number of stories since the last book. When I gathered everything from Instagram & twitter & my notebooks from the past two years, I had over 400 stories. (When I first printed out the ones from twitter, which are very, very short, the printout was 32 pages long. Yikes...)

So, I obviously have to throw out a lot of stories. But these stories come from my life, so throwing them out sometimes feels like removing a body part. There are times when I have the stories spread out in front of me that I actually have conversations with them. You know I love you, I'll say, but you're not going to fit here. But maybe in the future. Because you really are one of my favorites.

But picking the stories isn't even the trickiest part. The trickiest part is deciding on the title. (I don't know if that's really the trickiest. But today it feels like that. So, that's what I'm going to go with...:-))

In the earlier books, I actually had the title in mind almost from the start. But in the last few, the title has come much, much later. It's almost like I need to see all the stories arranged before I can even start to have a title that makes sense.

I've had four titles for this one (not counting the working title 'The Book of Living'. But the working title just gets me started...).

The first was When I Was Magic.

I liked this a lot. But when I showed it to people on Instagram & Facebook, there were a lot of comments about how I didn't used to be magic, how I was STILL magic. Which made me stop. Because I don't think this is a book about me. This is a book about you & how to find the magic in the moments of your life. So, even though I liked the title, I threw it out.

Then came Wild True Heart: On Remembering Who You Are. That lasted about a day. Mainly because almost everyone who saw it said I already know who I am. Why would I want a book about it? It wasn't worth the arguments. So, bye.

I played with one more title, Almost Like Magic, but even as I finished off the graphic for it, it didn't feel exactly right & so I changed it to the title we have today: Something Like Magic: On Remembering How to Be Alive.

I like it. It speaks to the stories of love & magic that fill the book. & to be fair, it's actually made it easier to trim down the 400, because now I know where they all fit.

So, now you know the title before everyone else. Yay. More to come...

Until next, with love,
Brian

P.S. I'll try to do shorter snippets as I go. But this first one I felt needed a bit more explanation. Next time, I'll dive into how the cover design came to be. Because it's very, very different than the earlier books... (Spoiler alert: it's a lot simpler than you think. HA.)