Life All Over Again: Build a Better Author Mindset with B A Paul

Welcome, dear readers! Thanks for picking up this second volume of blog post compilations from bapaul.com.

Life Along the Way holds the first one hundred blog posts I created for my website.

Life All Over Again contains the second hundred.

Two hundred! Some came easy—all I had to do was watch myself be a fool in the kitchen or follow a cat around for a day, or the Hubs, and voila! The blogs wrote themselves.

Others required more reflection, and at times, a little more guts to put myself out there, give you a peek behind the Big Top CIRCUS and share parts of my jumbled-up creative process.

In the first volume, the tagline was: A novice author’s journey toward self-publication. I hadn’t sold anything when I first started the blogs — not via the self-publishing route or otherwise.

For this volume, the tag line reads: A not-so-novice author’s journey toward self-publication. Not-so novice because I have sold a few things here and there, self-published and otherwise. (Enough to have to pay a dab of taxes on the bounty!)

Life All Over Again covers the timeframe from Fall of 2020 to Spring of 2023.

Yeah, you read that right.

2020.

And 2021.

And 2022.

Years and years of outside stressors for everyone—literally everyone—on the planet.

I touch on some of those heavier issues—it was, after all, 2020—but I tried not to dwell. We’ve all had enough of that stuff, and I’ve now been on a news-free diet for months and I don’t miss knowing things. At all.

I’ve got enough to “know” within my own four walls, like:

Where’s that sound coming from?

There’s smoke in here. Is that normal?

Why’s there a mess in my freezer?

Again, with the sound.

Who missed their medication?

What’s burning?

What’s leaking?

Who’s leaking?

If you took your medication, would you still be leaking?

These are the most pressing questions of my days and nights… No major news outlets required.

Many of my blogs address my very own CIRCUS (all caps for reasons you’ll discover as you read) and trying to navigate life while, well, having a life.

Little Miss Muse joins me for each “looking back” section, adding in her two-cent’s worth, or as she’d rather me put it, her billion-dollars’ worth to how the journey’s going so far. (If you’d like to get a sense of Little Miss, visit bapaul.com. She’s got her own landing page there!)

When I revisited these one hundred posts, I noticed a few things.

1.I don’t always remember what I write; at times, it was like reading a long-lost diary of a stranger.

2.I need help. Pro-level help.

3.My Muse is psychotic.

4.My ducks never want to line up.

5.I’m living in a loop of the same patterns I had in Life Along the Way: Procrastination. Blessings. Grief. Happiness. Loss. Joy. Frustration. Productivity.

Then repeat it all. Month after month. The highest of highs and lowest of lows.

I guess that’s life all over again.

It’s all giving me whiplash and a bit of carsickness, but there you have it.

My hope with this project is that you’ll see yourself in some of my maniacal days. Perhaps have a laugh with me—or at me. Cry with me. Roll your eyes and nod your head because, even though you’d never admit it in writing, you’re as messed up as I am.

Whether you’re a fellow writer or creative, or whether you couldn’t imagine your way out of a brown paper bag, you’re welcome to journey along whatever path you’ve chosen for yourself, and I’ll journey alongside on mine, and we can try to hang onto this crazy, spinning orb together.

And as long as my CIRCUS and your circus never join forces, we’ll be just fine.

Little Miss is bored of intros, now. She’s ready to get to the meat and potatoes and grape bubblegum of the posts. “Perhaps by Volume 3, you’ll be able to tag-line that baby: A pro-author and her invaluable Muse’s guide to ruling the universe.”

“Cool your jets, Little Miss. We need a few more titles under our wings before we can fly that high.”

She lays her new quiverful of bottle rockets at my feet and begins wiring them up in sequence.

“How high we talkin’?”