Here’s a little story about how it all happened.

I started way back in, oh, 2002 or so, not too long after my own wedding.  I was going gangbusters on it for a while.  My husband, especially, was excited about it—he said he had a good feeling about it, right from the start.  It got to be about book length, but after a while, I just… stopped.  I couldn’t find the throughline—I couldn’t figure out what the book was about.  My husband kept nudging me and nudging me, “Just finish the book!”  But I was well and truly stuck.

Life went on.  I got a deal for another book, we became parents…  Every so often, particularly when I’d get into my “what am I doing with my life?” lament, my husband would say “You know?  You should just finish that wedding book.” and I’d say, “I know, I know…”  I’d open up the file, fiddle with a few words, and then close it again.

Then, last year—I don’t know what changed, but I decided it was time.  I had a trip planned, and I came up with a cunning scheme:  I printed out the entire thing, tossed a red pen in my bag, and (this is the key) packed nothing else to read for the entire trip.

Away from home and family and distractions of all sorts, I read every word, red pen in hand.  I crossed out paragraphs, pages, and whole chapters.  I scribbled notes in the margin and wrote whole new chapters out in longhand.  By the end of the trip, I knew what the book was about.  It wasn’t about DIY, or saving money, or even creativity (though all those things are woven through it).

It is a book about making choices—meaningful, personal choices.  It’s about getting to the heart of what marriage means to you and building an event around that.  It’s about you—as a couple—being true to yourselves.

Going Home Married: How to Plan a Meaningful Wedding Without Losing Your Mind is a workbook, a series of questions designed to help readers find their own meaning in the wedding ceremony and design an event around that. I aim to deflate stress by questioning the familiar wedding hoopla. Unlike most wedding books, which start with either the budget or the dress, I make the radical argument that the ceremony is the heart of a wedding, and that once you’re married, all the rest is icing on the cake (as it were). Going Home Married walks readers through the myriad choices they’ll encounter on the path to making their wedding their own.

The highest praise I could imagine came from a friend who was in the thick of wedding planning when she read a draft: “This book made me feel not-crazy.”

So: that’s my book, and I’m super-excited to get it out into the world.  What do you think?  I’d love to hear your reactions in the comments.

Care to read a chapter?  Just jump on my mailing list and I’ll send it over.