Three years after I had the cuckoo idea to write a book, I wrote a book.
It’s wild the way these things happen. You sit in front of a computer one day, force yourself to type out some garble, do that over and over again, and voilà! It eventually becomes something you can touch and hold and smell and lick (that last part is purely hypothetical, of course). A book is a tangible object, one with weight—it’s not words on a screen, not words on newsprint, but words between covers, ready to be propped up in bed; marked with pen; dog-eared; water-stained; and kept on bookshelves, nightstands, library stacks, and coffee tables.
But for me, the coolest thing about writing a book isn’t just seeing my ideas made physical—it’s the fact that I’ve contributed a small bit into the stream of literature that I’ve drunk from since childhood, and to which I’d never before given anything back. To have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) of my very own is mind-boggling: A few drops of that stream came from me.
I say “contributed,” but really I mean “will eventually contribute to.” Publishing a book takes a really, really, ridiculously long time compared to the fast-paced world of digital media. I came up with the idea for my book in March 2020, signed on with a literary agent in September 2021, finished and submitted the proposal to her in October 2021, signed a contract with a publisher in August 2022, turned in the manuscript in January 2023, and expect to see copies on shelves sometime in the fall. Writing a book is not for the impatient, but genuinely good ideas should be able to stand the test of time. Hopefully, this one—a guide to ciders, written for beer lovers—is one of them.
A lot of people have asked me things like “What was it like to write a book?” and the first word that jumps to mind isn’t “hard” (although it was). It’s “inevitable.” It’s less that I chose to write it and more that I simply succumbed to the already-decided. I didn’t always like writing it. A lot of the time I really, really hated it. Sometimes I would read certain paragraphs so many times that I genuinely thought I might be losing my mind. (That happens to writers, I hear.)
But at no point did I, even for one second, think that once I had started I would not finish. At some point you realize that you’re halfway there, almost there, so close to being done that the abstract end you’ve envisioned this entire time is within reach. It’s like having a baby, but instead of passively growing something inside of you, you’re assembling every tiny bit, day in and day out, helping it grow to the point of birth, at which point the world takes over and you hope to God people accept it.
“Now that it’s turned in, how do you feel?” is another question I get a lot. The moment after I, somewhat unceremoniously, hit “send” on the email containing my manuscript, I realized two things. First, I had been wearing the same clothes for several days and really needed to take a shower. Two, I was starving. The two extra cups of coffee I’d had that morning weren’t exactly doing my nervous system any favors, and I badly needed some protein to level myself out. (So, naturally, I ate a bunch of carbs and took the rest of the day off.)
It’s been a few weeks since I turned in the manuscript to the publisher, and not much has changed. I’ve weirdly been able to move back into my “before” routine without much fanfare. I got back into pitching, despite some cobwebs in that part of my brain, and started recording podcasts again. My home life didn’t change much either, although I’m sure my husband, who picked up most of my self-induced-writing-prioritization slack over the last few months, probably feels beyond grateful this albatross has flown from our collective necks. I’m not as lost in my own thoughts and process anymore, and I can even lend a hand to raising our child again—imagine that!
The biggest takeaway about the process of actually writing a book is how deeply humbling an endeavor it was. I had to call in a lot—like, a lot—of favors to even start thinking about writing it. My GBH editor Claire Bullen shared her own book proposal with me to help me sketch out the earliest iteration of the outline. My neighbor Luke Schmuecker, who happens to be both a supremely talented photographer and a partner at a cider company, gave me both great insight into the industry, as well as a phenomenally charitable rate for his photographs. My colleague Jeff Alworth, who I consider to be an icon of the beer writing world, graciously lent his name and credibility to the manuscript by writing a foreword. I even asked my friend Tim Skirven, who I’ve known since high school, to create over 100 custom illustrations for a price I know is well below his professional rate. I literally asked the best cider-makers in the world to endorse my book, and by God, they did. Is this what they mean by #blessed?
It helps to know talented people, and I hope to one day pay their generosity forward to anyone else undertaking their own book. But in the meantime, my advice to aspiring authors is exactly that: Build up as many favors and as much good karma as you can, because you are going to tap into every single bit of it. And I probably will too. It’s weird to think that my first book isn’t even officially out yet, and I can already picture myself doing the entire process over again. Writing is a very strange, magnetic force that somehow both pulls you in and repels you at the very thought of it. I loved it, I hated it, but at the very least, next time I’ll shower through it.
“The Beer Lover’s Guide to Cider: American Ciders for Craft Beer Fans to Explore” will be out in October 2023. I hope you enjoy it.
