Writing my novel, Uly Quits His Job, is like digging post holes.

 

For most of his adult life, my father, Paul B. Williams, delighted in having a small farm with garden vegetables, and when I was young, a variety of farm animals.

When I was a kid, we had goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs for many years. My dad especially liked Nubian goats and rabbits with the long floppy ears.

Before we could have farm animals; however, we needed a fence.

When I was seven, we moved to rural Georgia from rural Alabama. Before too long, my dad had decided to build a fence around three or four acres of land next to our house. This was the fence that would eventually keep all those farm animals from wandering off.

Daddy acquired a truck load of old railroad ties that he was going to use for the fence posts. Railroad ties are huge and heavy and have to be in the ground deep enough to remain upright. It’s a big job to use railroad ties for fence posts.

In addition, south Georgia is notorious for an abundance of red clay in its soil. If it hasn’t rained in a while, the clay packs down hard and becomes slick and thick when it does rain.

Every day Daddy would come home from his day job and start digging post holes until dark. He spent countless hours digging several each day in the hard-baked red dirt.

My dad was tall, strong and athletic but the difficulty of digging holes in the hard red clay was wearing him out. He would never give up on his dream of having farm animals, but something had to give.

For a time he quit working on the fence. Then one day he said to my mom, Linda, “I think I’ll just dig one post hole every day.”

One post hole at a time. One a day.

Before I was eight, we were installing the wire fencing onto the poles. Building the fence might have taken an extra month or two but so what?

To this day, we refer to the sequence of jobs that have to be done to complete a project as “post holes.”

That’s the right attitude to have when writing, publishing and launching a book into the world. It’s a complicated, step-by-step process that takes time.

I had written a book and the draft was done. At that point there was a long checklist of tasks that had to be completed from rounds of edits to marketing efforts. The list in the project management software used by my publisher, Siretona Creative, gave me pause when I first saw it. Then I realized there were sublists. But that was okay. Each task is a “post hole.”

I spent three hours chatting online one day with tech support trying to troubleshoot how to properly set up DNS numbers for my domain name. I have no idea what that means, but I refuse to be overwhelmed.

That task was one post hole.

I took care of another one today. I’ll dig another one tomorrow.

The wonderful part about it, is that I’m not tackling these jobs alone. Many of you reading this have dug your own post holes for me by helping me in one way or another. I’m incredibly grateful for your volunteer help.

Others of you are staff members at Siretona Creative. You have to dig many of your own post holes that will benefit me that I don’t even know about.

Finally, the community of writers that I’ve met through Siretona is remarkable. I would never have guessed—actually I was skeptical—that the community that Colleen McCubbin has put together at Siretona would have value.

I was wrong to be skeptical.

I thought that I just needed to know where to dig the post holes and when to dig them. In fact I need the encouragement of my new friends in Siretona’s “Nestbuilder Community” to keep digging the post holes. It’s a long fence.

As with most things in life that are worth doing, writing a book is not something I can do quickly or easily. First, there is no book without the inspiration that comes to me from the Holy Spirit. The characters don’t exist anywhere except on the page where I wrote them into existence, but it seems like the Creator creates them.

Second, the help, support and encouragement of friends and family is what makes it possible for me to keep pushing this project forward. That, and the good example my Mama and Daddy provided of being undaunted by difficulty.

Before long after we dig the last “post hole,” Uly Quits His Job will be released to the public. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Travis