Behind the Book: The Making of The Venus Fly Trap
People often think books are born in a single lightning flash of inspiration — one moment you’re sipping coffee, the next you’ve poured out 300 pages of brilliance. The reality? Writing The Venus Fly Trap was less a lightning strike and more a long storm: messy, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore.
This wasn’t just a book. It was a reckoning. A confession. A survival project. And the process of bringing it to life was almost as wild as the stories inside it.
The Decision to Tell It All
I didn’t start out planning to publish. At first, I was just writing for myself — scribbled notes, journal entries, fragments of conversations replaying in my head at 3 a.m. But as the pile grew, I realized I wasn’t writing to remember. I was writing to release.
And then came the scarier realization: if I released it just for me, I’d never face the full truth. To really step into the light, I had to put it out there. I had to let others read it, judge it, recognize themselves in it.
That’s when The Venus Fly Trap stopped being a private exercise and became a public book.
Wrestling With Shame
The hardest part of the process wasn’t the writing. It was the resistance. Every time I sat down, shame whispered: “You can’t say that. People will think less of you. They’ll laugh at you. They’ll cancel you.”
I had to learn to write anyway — to write as if no one was watching. To put the truth down first, and only later worry about how it might land. It was an act of defiance, not just against the expectations of others, but against the voices in my own head.
Finding the Voice
At first, I wrote in fragments. Detached, almost clinical. But it felt flat. My story wasn’t clinical — it was raw, messy, hilarious, painful, ridiculous. So I went back and wrote it the way I told stories to friends: conversational, confessional, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes heartbreaking.
Once I found that voice, the pages started to flow. The book came alive not because I mastered “literary craft,” but because I let myself sound like me.
Editing the Chaos
If writing was liberation, editing was surgery. Whole chapters came out. Scenes I loved were cut because they didn’t serve the story. I wrestled with how much detail was too much, and how much honesty was not enough.
There’s a saying: “Kill your darlings.” It’s true. Some of my funniest, juiciest anecdotes didn’t make it in, not because they weren’t good, but because they didn’t serve the larger truth. Those ended up in the vault — the bonus content, the Year of Secrets.
The Technical Journey
Then came the mechanics: formatting, publishing, marketing. Hours spent learning tools like Atticus, agonizing over cover design, tinkering with fonts and margins. Recording the audiobook on my Mac with a Samson Q9U mic, only to re-record half of it because perfectionism wouldn’t let me off the hook.
This part of the journey was less glamorous, but it mattered. Because a story isn’t just written — it’s delivered. And I wanted mine delivered in a way that did justice to the words.
The Unexpected Lessons
Looking back, here’s what I learned from making The Venus Fly Trap:
- Writing is therapy, publishing is courage. Writing for yourself heals you. Publishing for others risks you — but also frees you.
- Vulnerability is magnetic. The more honest I was, the more people leaned in, not away.
- The story chooses you. I didn’t write this book because it was marketable. I wrote it because it wouldn’t leave me alone.
- Community matters. Early readers, editors, friends — they all helped me see what I couldn’t on my own.
Why I Share the Behind-the-Scenes
Readers often think authors sit in a neat office with a neat life, typing out neat sentences. I share the chaos behind the book to remind you that creativity is never neat. It’s messy, human, full of fear and laughter and coffee stains.
If you’ve ever thought about telling your own story, know this: you don’t need perfection. You just need the guts to start.
Final Thought
The Venus Fly Trap wasn’t just written. It was wrestled into being. And every page is a reminder that truth, once told, has a life of its own.
