On having my heart broken...

and on our greatest strength.

I have been packing and shipping a few early copies of the high-quality printed version of my 2025 One Day at a Time Diary. It's not supposed to be available until tomorrow, but I have been sending some of them out a little early because I don't want to be overwhelmed.

I am so excited about this diary - I had my heart broken over it and didn't realise until I held a brand-new, professionally printed copy in my hands. That's important to know - on having your heart broken, it takes a long time to heal. Longer even than you may realise.

There is something of value to this process. I was not going to give up on myself, or on my heart. But it took time, and energy.

After a little shock, I summoned the enthusiasm to create the 2024 version of my diary. You can read about that here:

When I held it in my hand, it wasn’t right, and it took me 3 goes, including changing the book size and the font size, until I was relatively happy. At least, I told myself it was good enough. Most of you loved it all the same. Something inside me, which I now know was my heart, shrank a little bit. My favourite picture of the 2024 diary was this one with my cat, because I love my cat.

I really wasn't happy with the finished product. It wasn’t right, there was something missing with it. And the process of getting them from me to the readers was stressful. I was using Bookvault and Amazon. Amazon print on demand is easy for me - you go to Amazon, buy the book and it prints and ships it to you. I have nothing to do! But the book quality was awful. The bleed (colourful bit) didn’t go to the edge of the pages. The cropping (the cutting of the page) was off, so some of the pages were lower down than others. And the paper quality wasn’t good enough to write on and hold its integrity. Bookvault was the only print on demand service that had a Wix integration, which meant that I could add the book as a product on my website, people could buy it there, and then BookVault would print and ship it for me. Yay! Bookvault’s quality was much better than Amazon’s, but my website would, at times, forget to tell Bookvault about an order. And because I had so many orders, I couldn’t keep track of them all. And, on top of that, Bookvault became overwhelmed with orders for the Christmas period, and so there were print delays, and delays, and more delays. Not only was I smashed in the heart by the process, but I had to deal with angry customers who wanted to know where in the heck their book was because they had bought it a month ago and there was only one week left till Christmas.

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I didn’t want to go through all of that again. I realised that my heart was, indeed broken over this diary.

My husband talked to me, put it into perspective, and asked me to try it again. One more time. People had said they got through the plandemic because of my diary. There was more than me at stake here. So I picked myself up off the floor, brushed myself down, and asked myself what the actual problem was. I narrowed it down to the printing - the relief! Bookvault was a disaster, and so was Amazon. I had an angle. I could work with that. I felt better.

I thought about printing out hard copies and selling them from my website. I found a printer in China that came recommended to me. I wasn’t really happy with the idea of China, but I talked to them, and they seemed to know what I wanted. They needed the final files of my diary by June at the latest, so they could print it and ship it to me in time for November. I let the deadline slip past. It was an unconscious decision at first, but when I questioned myself, I realised that I want this to be an Irish product. I don’t want to be doing business with China. That seemed fair enough to me.

Shipping books is a big job. I had already been approached by Rachel Drury who suggested I use her website, BuyTheBook.ie for my diary. We tried it for signed paperback versions of Weapons of Mass Protection, it was an easy process once I had figured it out, and I liked that I could send a physical book to someone in Ireland with no fuss. Outside of Ireland, it’s a different story, however - customs forms, duty taxes and very expensive postage doesn’t do anybody any favours. I still needed some sort of print on demand service, but I would have the Irish market covered.

Between Weapons and the diary, I published another book. This was last September, to commemorate 10 years of my online healing programme Raise Your Vibration Bootcamp. And to make it more complicated for myself, I decided this book had to be paperback only - no online versions!! I sold signed copies to my Irish audience via Buy The Book, and print-on-demand copies via Amazon - just to see how it would go. It was easy to do! Amazon did a good print job - they are good when it comes to ordinary books. But One Day at a Time isn’t an ordinary book. I still needed a solution.

Then something remarkable happened. Lulu opened it’s channel web stores and offered a Wix integration. I had been using LuLu as a higher end print on demand service for personal reasons. I put my book up there so that I could get copies of it to see it before launching it out into the real world, so to speak. Lulu printing was the best print on demand that I had come across, however, selling the book from Lulu was not as easy to do. And now, all of a sudden, it was easy!

I sent around some queries and found an Irish printer who gave me lots of help to find the right paper quality, binding and laminate for the cover. They even suggested I added flaps to the cover so they could act as bookmarks! They gave me a good price, but I couldn’t go ahead with it as they would not give me any less than 500 copies. I didn’t want to be stuck with too many copies, and finding the money up front to pay for more copies than I needed didn’t work well for me. I took the specifications to another printer who said they could do 350 copies, which felt more manageable. They were amazing too - helping me with the cover redesign so that the spine lined up perfectly, and the cover flaps were the right size. I had no idea what to print on the inside cover so I left it blank.

I was worried as it took 2 weeks longer to print them than I expected. Once they had them printed they sent me a video to prove they were real! They looked really great, I was relieved. I must say there is something to having a relationship with a company via a real person, rather than through a website, I felt they did look after me through this book-birthing process.

Then the day came, and the diaries were delivered to my house. I must say I was holding my breath. When I opened the first box and held the first one, I couldn't put it down for an hour. I didn’t realise how emotional I was. As I said, I was in-grief about not being able to reproduce the quality, and here it is - even better I think than previous diaries. It looks just amazing.

The boxes piled up in the hallway - this is the joy of printing and selling an actual physical copy of a book.

Sinjin’s litter tray has been displaced! He doesn’t mind! And the boxes will slowly disappear as the diaries are sold, because this year, the diary is the best one I’ve ever made. I’ve never felt happier about it - yes there are things inside the covers that I know I can do better, but I finally feel that I have a starting point. I have reclaimed this diary as my own.

New font, new size, and tons of energy inside of it. Lots of healing to be had. I even did a ‘crystal of the month’ each month. It looks bloody amazing, even the LuLu version (not shown here).

I haven't missed a year - I'm proud of that. 2024 has been an incredible year, and we are going on to better and better things. I now see the 2024 diary is a bridge between what was, and what can be. It really speaks to more than just the diary - this year really has been a bridge for more reasons than I could ever say in one Substack post.

My 2024 diary is on my bookshelf standing proudly with the old and the new. It is a year that I know I will look back upon fondly, the year where we found our resilience, where we said we would never give up. The year where we found our tribe, our voice, and our hope for the future. We can do this.

I can’t go to book shops with my beautiful diary to have them stock them because the bookstore market is sewn up. I have asked already, they don't accept new publishers like Praxis unless they are ‘approved’ by the system, which doesn't approve new publishers. That's why I'm so grateful to Rachel for her website Buy The Book, supplying Irish independent books to the Irish market.

If you do go there to buy a copy of my diary, please have a browse and see if there are any other books there that you would also like to add to your cart - from autobiographies to children's books, there is so much talent out there. This is the new way of doing business.

I will find a printer and a distributor for the UK for next year, and possibly for the USA as well, so everyone can have a high quality copy of my 2026 diary. I’ve gone from not wanting to do a diary at all, to getting excited to make the next one before this one has even gone properly on sale! I hope you find what makes you excited too.

CLICK HERE IF YOU WANT TO BUY A COPY OF MY DIARY!

If you read back on this article you may recognise that it’s a good example of the subconscious workings of the mind coming into consciousness. On several occasions I wrote about how I didn’t recognise exactly what was upsetting me and had to sit myself down and ask myself what was going on with me. This is what happens when we are less critical, and more helpful with ourselves.

I always say the most important relationship we have is the one we have with ourselves. I didn’t get angry at myself once for how I felt or acted, for example missing the Chinese deadline—I’m human and that’s what humans do. We are all human, under the influence of other entities at times perhaps, but human all the same. When we know ourselves, then that becomes our greatest strength. My diary is a healing diary and can help you get to know yourself better and improve the relationship you have with yourself, if you let it.