Big Announcement: Ego Management!

[Edit, 9/28/15: We have a new title! It's Life Without Envy: Ego Management for Creative People.]

I've been sitting on this top-secret project for awhile now, and I'm SO HAPPY I can finally tell you about it! Here's last week's announcement from Publishers' Marketplace:

This book started out as a guest post, "The Laughter of Sanity" (my favorite phrase from Eckhart Tolle), for Nova's blog back in February 2012. You can also see a glimmering here. The provisional subtitle is Tough Love for Creative People.

You know what they say about making lemonade out of the bitter fruit you've been handed (and a cliché is a cliché for a reason)? Going out of print turned out to be the biggest gift for me in terms of personal growth. I came out of that squirmy, frustrating-as-hell period with a firm grasp of what's truly important. Now I know I can be joyful and content with my life and work even if my novels never hit the bestseller list—that my happiness is entirely up to me. I no longer stake my sense of fulfillment and self worth on factors beyond my control.

Have I successfully managed my ego? Heck no! It's a daily process, and it will be a daily process for the rest of my life. Ego Management offers practical strategies for pulling yourself out of that mental and emotional quagmire of jealousy and frustration, not just once, but whenever you feel yourself sinking. We are only human, after all.

I feel so very blessed that I get to work on this book with my fiction editor, Sara Goodman. When you have an off-the-wall project like this you generally send the manuscript to your primary editor just as a courtesy, but in this case she really wanted to be able to publish it, so she made it happen. Again, thanks to that frustrating experience with Crown, I feel even more grateful for the enthusiasm and support I've received (and will continue to receive) from St. Martin's Press.

If you live in the Boston area and would love a sneak peek at Ego Management, get yourself a ticket for the #whatimake Conference in New Bedford on Saturday, October 17th! My presentation, "Private Writing for Public Impact," draws on several of the most crucial points I make in the book, and there'll be a complementary workshop afterward called "Mind Mapping for Self Discovery."

I can't WAIT to see this little book out into the world!

[Edit: I didn't mention a pub date because I don't have more than the roughest idea at this point—2017, realistically. I will know more after my first editorial phone call, which is hopefully happening next week.]