I am in the process of writing a book; I have never written a book before, many articles but never a book. I enjoy the gratification of completing an article; I can do it in a few days. But a book will take a long time. And this book has been waiting to be born for a long time. I could no longer ignore its call. So I’m writing a book, one sentence at a time, one day at a time. And I’m learning to trust my intuition, and to just sit and write even though everything in me wants to avoid it.

My book is about the relationship between the state of our society and our system of schooling. I am a retired teacher. I have taught on three continents, in public and private schools, in charter schools and homeschooling learning centers. I know the world of education intimately! I am perfectly poised for this project, and my inner self is not letting me off the hook. But it is a much bigger task than I anticipated. Or maybe I didn’t anticipate the scale of the task, because I arrived at the point of no return and no longer had any choice. I just had to take it on.

So I began by ordering a large number of books on the history of education; then I started reading and taking notes. Remember, I’ve never written a book before, so I have no template or system for going about it. I take it a day at a time, devoting two hours a day to book-related work–broadly defined as whatever engages me most for each session. Today I am writing this article, because I feel a need to document my process. I am still in the very early stages of research, but at this point I am hooked.