my husband is an incredible gift giver, but this year he really outdid himself. i told him that i want to write a book, to which he replied, “you already have.” he published my entire substack in hardcover to prove it 😭

this past summer dan decided that he wanted to give me a hard copy of my writing, but of course it was never going to be as simple as copy-pasting my weekly essays and printing a manuscript.

if you’ve read any of my writing, you know that i don’t capitalize anything… which means that dan edited 340 pages of writing, capitalizing every single word that needed it. this process alone took weeks. then he found a publisher and watched countless youtubes to figure out how to properly format a book with page numbers, titles, my name and mother curious at the top of the pages. he wrote an about the author for me and a foreword about how he fell in love with my writing before he even fell in love with me.

he worked with a graphic designer to create the book cover (which he will tell you still needs to be centered etc.). for the back cover he read every single comment anyone wrote on my substack and collected all of his favorites so that he could pick oit his top four and put them as blurbs on the back cover. he reverse-engineered my substack logo so that the font was the same. he had to choose which font to use for the body of the book. oh, and he had to choose the fabric for the hard cover and the paper and it is all such high quality.

february 26, 2025 i woke up and decided to start publishing my writing weekly and today, december 26, 2025 i am holding the first draft of my book in my hands. you can do it. keep going 💘

huge thank you to Brianna Schubert Marina Mofford Kaitlyn Pacheco and kayla for your beautiful comments that became my book blurbs.