When I signed my book deal, and began my first time author journey, I thought the hard part would be writing the words. Turns out, the real challenge was letting go of who I used to be. This wasn’t just a writing process. It was a becoming process.
If you’re navigating your own first time author journey – or any big identity shift – here’s what writing my first book taught me.
1. I Didn’t Think I Had Enough to Say… Then I Wrote 60,000+ Words
When I first pitched my book, editors doubted I could write 40,000 words about overwhelm. I doubted it too.
But once I gave myself the space to just write, the words poured out. I wrote over 75% of the manuscript in just two months. Why? Because I was finally in flow. I cleared time, adjusted my business, and let the message lead.
Your first time author journey doesn’t start with being “ready.” It starts when you decide to show up anyway. It reveals what you’re capable of once you stop doubting your voice.
2. Structuring My book Was Simpler Than I Expected
I thought turning my keynote talks into a book would be complicated. At first, I wrote it as a memoir. Then I got asked to revise and resubmit – and that changed everything.
Instead of just my story, I wove in research from interviews with 100+ working moms. The final structure mirrored my speaking: a powerful story, clear data, and actionable tools.
It didn’t need to be fancy. It needed to be honest. That’s what readers connect with.
If you’ve seen my keynote on the Overwhelm Culprits, you’ll love the book.
3. How writing Forced Me to Let Go of My Old Identity
Writing this book forced me to look at the woman I used to be – the one I was writing for. A single mom, overwhelmed, leading at work and home while breaking inside.
To write this book, I had to release that identity and step into a new one: author. Not “aspiring author.” Not “maybe someday.” A real-deal, manuscript-submitted author.
My first time author journey wasn’t just about writing – it was about becoming.
4. Resistance Wasn’t in the Writing – It Was Emotional
I created a writing habit. Two hours a day, every morning. But what caught me off guard was the emotional resistance.
This book shares stories I’ve never told on stage. Stories I haven’t even said out loud. I needed space – not just in my calendar, but in my heart – to tell them.
Sometimes this means making peace with parts of you that still ache. And that emotional release is a powerful part of any first time author journey.
5. The Breakthrough Was in the Messy Middle
I didn’t feel like an author when I signed the deal. Or when I wrote the first chapter. Or even halfway through.
But the moment I hit submit – early, mind you – I knew: this is the most valuable work I’ve ever done. I gave it everything. And that’s enough.
The transformation didn’t happen at the start or the end. It happened in the messy, unsure, “I-don’t-know-if-I-can-do-this” middle.
What writing Taught Me About Myself
The book? It’s about overcoming overwhelm. But the writing of it taught me how to live what I teach.
If you’re stuck in your own messy middle – between who you were and who you’re becoming – I see you. Your first time author journey might not look like mine, but the transformation is just as real.
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[00:00:00] When I sat down to write this book, I didn’t expect it to break me open, but it did.
In this episode, I’m sharing what it really looked like to go from a speaker to a coach, to a first time author, and how writing this book has forced me to let go of who I was in order to become who I really needed to be.
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck between the chapters of your life, this one’s for you.
If you’re navigating your own messy middle between who you once were and who you’re in the process of becoming, make sure you subscribe. I share real stories, leadership strategies, and tools to help ambitious women take confident action and avoid burnout altogether.
Here’s the truth. I’ve been speaking for years. I’ve been coaching high achieving women to overcome overwhelm again for years, but nothing ever could have prepared me for what writing this book would uncover.
It had [00:01:00] absolutely nothing to do about strategy. It was all about identity, and that’s where the real work ended up happening.
So today I figured it would be fun. Why not share five different reflections I had that were surprising even to me about the process of writing a book.
So the first one, which shocked me was I filled over 60,000 words in this book, like. Let me Tell you how surprising this was. So part of me, even when I was going through the proposal phase, even though like I kind of knew intuitively, like, yeah, Corrie, you could probably write something between like 50,000, 40 to 50,000 words.
It still made me nervous that I’m like, how am I gonna write a book on the topic of overwhelm? That’s that long, right? Because it was the first time I was ever doing it. And when I went through the submission process, when my editors started sending my book proposal to different editors, some of the responses that we got through [00:02:00] some of the rejections that we received was they worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill a long enough book, they weren’t sure I was gonna be able to fill 40,000 words for a book on the topic of overwhelm. So The fact that when I went and I did my final compile right before getting ready to hand in my manuscript, and it was over 60,000, I was so surprised. And here’s what ended up happening though.
It was interesting ’cause I had actually started the book through the proposal process. I had written , maybe like 10,000 words when I initially did the first few sample chapters, and through the process, one editor at a big five had actually asked for a revise and resubmit.
That’s called an r and r in the industry, and it was an editor I really was excited to potentially work with. So I was like, you know what, why not, let’s do it. And in the course of a week I rewrote it and I added another 17,000 words. So I ended up with multiple different chapters done. So that ultimately didn’t end up selling to that editor, it ended up [00:03:00] selling to the editor I’m working with now and I am so, so grateful that I did the revise and resubmit because the book is so much better for it. It, we completely changed the format of the book. It was initially done as more of a memoir and now it is more of a traditional, prescriptive self-help, you know, where it’s a hybrid memoir, but mostly self-help book.
So it definitely worked. In everybody’s favor for me doing the r and r. But the surprising part was when I started the process, I was at maybe that 17,000 words. So the fact that, and mind you too, I sold the book in March. So it is now at the time of this recording, the very end of June, my deadline to get my manuscript in was July 1st.
So I’m actually getting in a bit ahead deadline, which I’m super excited and proud about. But that said. In the month of March when I sold the book, I was in the middle of international, women’s Day events, women’s history, month events. March is really busy and I was fully booked out, so I didn’t actually start writing the book like full [00:04:00] time until April.
So just the fact that I was able to turn out that many words in that short of a timeframe, it blows my mind. But the reason why it happened is because I was so in flow. It just, came out the way it was supposed to come out. I had created the time and the space for it. I had adjusted my business to be able to just focus on writing as opposed to other areas of my business, like coaching and speaking.
And it flowed and it came out exactly the way it should have. And it’s amazing because over 75% of the book I wrote in just two months, and I am so, so proud of that. So that was the first, observation. I was surprised. I didn’t think I had enough to say. And here we go. We got a book at 60,000 words.
More than likely it probably won’t come out at that many. We’ll see, you know, where my editor and her team comes through, with their part of the process. But I have plenty of content in there to fill out a really, really, data and strategy intensive self-help [00:05:00] book.
So the next thing that surprised me, because you know, it’s really daunting to go from giving basically 60 minute keynote speeches or workshops and trying to figure out how to format that information into something like a self-help book, you know, into a book in general.
And I was really freaked out by the structure. Because initially I had gone through trying to do it as a memoir, so I was just gonna focus on storytelling, which a lot of my, if you ever been to one of my keynotes in particular, it’s mostly storytelling.
I deliver lessons and coaching and information through stories and that’s something that I really excel at. So I had really initially viewed this book as being mostly that, and through the RR process, I started pulling in a lot of the research that I’ve done over the years. I had done a, research projects for something, a project that was entirely unrelated to all of this. It just worked out really well that I was able to leverage it for something else. I was initially using it to develop coaching programs that [00:06:00] could help working moms, but I had interviewed over a hundred working moms over the course of two or three years, on why they felt overwhelmed.
Like where it was coming from, how it was manifesting for them, what solutions they had looked into. So shifting the structure of the book from a memoir to a self-help turned out to be simpler than I expected because I had all of this research, right? And it was something that I hadn’t really thought of leveraging before.
I was tasked with potentially doing the, r and r, for that one editor. And sure the structure is super simple, you know, and I think that played a huge part into why the writing process just flowed, you know? And the book is structured very similar to my keynote. So if you’ve ever attended one of my keynotes and you liked it, you will love this book.
It’s very much where we kick it off with a story, a very personally grounded, vulnerable story. And then from there, sharing, why this challenge happens through a variety of whether it be, data on, systematic issues women at the workforce [00:07:00] experience.
It’s also information through my research. So tying other women’s stories and their experience to my experience and how common it is. And then from there, going into the different, tools, resources, guides, exercises that I personally used and I’ve now used with my coaching clients to navigate. Whatever that situation is.
So I didn’t try to be fancy, like I really focused on it being clear, and concise, like this is what the challenge is. But most importantly, I really wanted this book to be something that women connect with, right? And the way that we connect is through sharing stories and experiences. So that’s something that’s ingrained through the entire book, and I feel overall it made the message much, much stronger.
And that’s all coming from a structure that, coming into the book, I was so afraid of how I was going to tackle something like this. And ultimately it ended up being much simpler than I had anticipated. So it’s a great lesson in that sometimes when we feel that things need to be really complex in order to be [00:08:00] valuable.
Sometimes the simplicity actually makes it easier to manage.
Now, the next observation that I made that was really surprising was I had initially thought going into this, that the hardest part was going to be in the writing of the book. And that had nothing to do with at all. I mean, the writing part was relatively simple for me. You know, as a natural storyteller.
It was basically me just putting what words I would be saying normally on paper, so that much wasn’t as much of a challenge. Where the challenge really lied was in letting go of my old identity. So to give some perspective on this, this book was written basically for the version of myself 10 years ago that was going through all of these incredibly overwhelming traumatic experiences while still being expected to show up and lead in a professional capacity as well as at home. You know, I was a single mother. I was the matriarch of the household. I was the breadwinner. Like I lead in both places. And [00:09:00] a big, big part of the challenge in writing this book was letting go of that old identity, which was really complicated to do.
When I am writing about that woman, as I go through the process. So it wasn’t just about words on the page, it was about becoming the version of myself who is an author today. And that was a big adjustment for me to wrap my head around because the woman author now who is writing this story with all of these lessons and all of this value to share, the woman that was me eight to 10 years ago when I had gone through all of that trauma was incredibly cathartic and it really brought attention to me on exactly how different I am, as an individual. It shifted me from being just, you know. Somebody talking about this experience to really taking on the ownership of more of a thought leader.
‘Cause authors are thought leaders and someone who really needed to own [00:10:00] my story. And that was a very messy middle adjustment for me in the process of writing the book plus everything else going on with my business and my kids and my household and everything else. So the, real challenge wasn’t the writing, it was becoming the version of myself who is an author while in the process of writing about my old identity, which is really kind of wild when you think about it.
So the fourth, thing that surprised me was I hit resistance. And the resistance wasn’t necessarily in writing. The writing part of it was easy. I actually started clearing out my mornings and every single day for two hours. It was just a, habit that I went through and I was writing and writing and writing.
So it wasn’t the writing part of it, it was actually emotional resistance that I felt. So I had paused in the month of March when the book had initially sold for speaking events. So I was still out and, part of this too is I’m still sharing these stories on stages when I do it, but the book was much different ’cause it was far more detailed.
You know, there’s a lot of stories and, details that I don’t share on [00:11:00] stage that are in the book. So that’s said, I paused in March for speaking gigs, but truthfully, I, still needed space to catch up with who I was becoming. So that month of March really helped me kind of integrate and prepare myself. For making sure I was going to be a writer, you know? So I had time in that month to be able to wind down any speaking engagements I had. I had already at this point, completely rolled back my coaching engagements ’cause I wasn’t gonna be able to coach in addition to writing a book full time.
So I had had that space and I’m really glad that I did because if I didn’t, it would’ve made the transition for me, stepping into my newer role as an author that much more difficult. Because as it was, it was difficult in the two months I was writing, for me to go through it, if I didn’t have that space before I started, it would’ve been that much more complicated.
So I, did hit a lot of resistance emotionally through the entire process. But as I [00:12:00] showed up every single day, and I knew in doing this, I wasn’t doing this for me, I’m doing this for the version of me 10 years ago. I’m doing this for the women out there who are in the exact same situation I was.
Because when I went through it, there were no resources. There are no books on the market, like when I’m writing, which is a, you know, a leadership book for women, specifically in leadership who are expected to do everything at home as well as in the workplace. It just doesn’t exist, and I really struggled.
So emotionally there was a lot of resistance, but ultimately I learned and I grew as an individual, as I pushed through that, and it ultimately helped me become this new version of myself who is now an author and submitted my manuscript this morning.
And the final. Surprising observation was overall my breakthrough didn’t come through in hitting submit on the manuscripts it came through in that entire messy middle, so I had to write from a place of not ready yet.
When I had actually gone through and [00:13:00] done the whole book proposal and everything else, and even had gotten an agent and then I had, an editor who, bought the project. I still did not believe I was an author. I had major, major, major imposter syndrome.
Like from the very beginning and even the first couple of days I was writing the book, I was all in my head all the time saying like, who am I to be writing this? Like, what value does this have for other people? And I had to continue to show up through that messy middle to finally by the point that I got to this morning when I hit submit on it.
I was like, you know what? This is the best work I’ve ever done. This is the most valuable work I’ve ever done. There is nothing else I can add to this from this point that will add more value to it. And I handed my manuscript in a full week early because I knew that everything that I had to give I’d already given.
Right. And it was through. That messy middle process. And mind you too, I’m not really ready to talk about everything just yet, but there was a lot of messy middle stuff in regards to my business because of all the different changes that we had to make to accommodate me [00:14:00] writing. And it was a really difficult pull the last couple of months to get it done and having to write from that place of not yet being fully ready, not yet being somebody who actually believes they’re an author, not yet being that version of a, thought leader that has a full suite of products, from books to talks to workshops, to coaching, right? Everything is not yet ready, but I’m still having to take action through it. And that ultimately got me to where I am now. So the breakthrough actually came through really challenging myself through everything this uncomfortable process of not really knowing if I’m ready and not really being sure what to do, but continuing to show up every single day. And ultimately, and this is the best way to kind of end these observations on, that’s what the book is about. The book is about feeling overwhelmed, feeling not ready, feeling stuck, but continuing to take action [00:15:00] anyway, right?
How do you get yourself into that mindset? How do you get yourself into that place that you’re still able to do that? And that is exactly what this book delivers, and I am so, so, so excited, yet slightly terrified. Just being honest that the manuscript is now to my editor. It’s up to her and her team to go through and really help me enhance it from this point.
But from when I hit submit there’s no role in it back, right? It is out there. It is gonna be for the world in 2026 at some point, and I am very proud and very excited to be able to share it with you when it’s there.
So to just kind of like recap ’em super, super quick.
It was that number one, I didn’t think I had enough to say, and yet I wrote over 60,000 words. Also I was really concerned that the process of writing a self-help book was going to be really complex, and the structure ultimately ended up being much simpler than I expected and far surpassed my expectations.
The third was, the real challenge wasn’t necessarily the writing, it was letting go of my old identity of whom I’m writing this book for, [00:16:00] right? I’m a very different person than I was back then, and that was really, really difficult from a mental perspective to let go of. Number four was when I hit resistance.
Right? How did I handle it? And I wasn’t hitting resistance in the writing part, but emotionally, you know? And I had to continue to show up each and every day to get it done. And last but not least, the surprise in that the breakthrough actually came in, the whole experience of the messy middle of not knowing exactly what to do, not fully owning myself in this new, role as an author, but still taking action and doing it anyway.
So I’d love to know, have you ever had to let go of who you were to become, who you were meant to be? Drop a comment below. I’d absolutely love to hear your messy middle stories too,
If you enjoyed this conversation and are curious about what my book is about and what you’re gonna learn in it, it’s actually based on a framework I created called The Five Overwhelm Culprits. So if you are in that stuck but evolving place that I talked about, my free overwhelm culprit [00:17:00] quiz will help you identify exactly what’s getting in your way and what to do next.
Plus, as an added benefit, you’ll also get updates on my book’s progress and when it’s gonna come out in 2026. So go ahead, take the quiz. You could find it at www.corrielo.com/overwhelmculprit, and we’ll also make sure that we link it below in the show notes.
Thanks again for being here, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Cory Lowe. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.