Echoes flies from the nest

Today is the day that my 11th book goes live. Echoes of Freedom Past: Reopening, Reclaiming and Restoring Liberty is a collection of my essays, blog posts and a short story about the subjects of freedom and tyranny, most of them from the past couple of years but also the 2008 chestnut “An election party where nobody came.”

That’s the piece where I first wrote, “Freedom is not about having the right ruler. Oh, wait, yes it is. Freedom is understanding that I am the boss of me.” The words spilled onto the page exactly as they formed in my brain: The “oh, wait” revelation occurred the moment after I wrote that first sentence.

I really enjoyed the little books that The Domino Project released about 10 years ago, books like Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird and Derek Sivers’ Anything You Want. Most of my books have been about that length — Echoes is 118 pages — and for the first time it’s also the same height and width as the Domino books. I’m pleased with the package, and I hope you will be, too.

I split my last new book, Full, into three themes: the creative process, freedom, and words of encouragement. Regular visitors to this site know I have continued to write about those themes, and I was calling this The Freedom Book until I settled on a name. I can tell you now that my next two collections started out as The Creativity Book, now tentatively titled Write Anything Until You Write Something, and The Encouragement Book, currently named It’s Going To Be All Right.

If blog post Likes were votes, I should have published the creativity book first, then the encouragement book, and maybe skip the freedom book altogether. But without freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and all those other freedoms, there would be precious little creative or encouraging activity in the world anyway. And so I roll out these words of freedom, because while they may not be the most popular of my writings, they are surely the most important.