I had to build the rocket first

The draft is under review. In the meantime, I'm getting down to design.

The draft is under review

When the year began, the last thing I expected was to be editing a book. As a designer I had always fantasized about writing one, but with no concrete idea in mind: I pictured a recipe book, an illustration book, a book about myself, and right there, after thinking for a while, I'd jump to something else, because I could never work out what would be interesting about reading me.

Getting started was hard. I went around in circles, like when you push your fork all over the plate and never pick anything up to eat.

The book came together in an atomic way: from one post. With a goal that bold, it was the first possible step. To get to the moon, I had to build the rocket first.

What I didn't expect was that doing would bring more things to do. The posts began to relate to each other and to ask for an order. Suddenly a story surfaced, one I had been carrying but hadn't quite put in order.

I started paying closer attention to how stories are told, I devoured books in record time, and that's when I noticed their power to inspire. I wanted a book you'd want to keep within reach, one you'd look at every day and that would help you get unstuck, because that's what the books I choose do for me.

Once I got going, I kept it up with dates: a month and a half ahead, I already knew I'd finish writing it on September twenty-first. What had been hard was the part before that: starting.

The wish had been there for years, but scattered, like loose thoughts that show up before falling asleep or on the way home from work, so isolated they don't have the force to move anything. I wanted the book, but wanting it wasn't enough to start it.

With that symptom in hand, was I right? I went out to test it with an experiment: forty-eight people committed to doing four activities in two weeks, and two of them had to be things they wanted to do. Almost half turned in nothing. Not even those. Wanting wasn't enough for them either.

Finding the story made me want to do everything else. Putting a book out into the world also means choosing the photos, the format, the layout, the paper, the cover: the object I want you to hold in your hands.

The rocket's countdown has begun.

J.