I’m often asked if I always wanted to be an author and write a book and the short answer is NO! Which leads to the second most frequently asked question… Who encouraged you to write this book? The short answer to that would be my Facebook friends! But I’d love to share a little backstory with you!!!
While I do have a degree in broadcast journalism and I’ve always liked to write, I never imagined that I could or would write a book.
It’s crazy to think back and acknowledge that I started writing “Conversations with Colton” seven years ago.
I didn’t write it in a conventional way, like you may be thinking. Instead, I started posting on Facebook about my interactions with my son using the hashtag Conversations with Colton. Get it? Conversations with Colton! It was crazy. I went back and looked at my very first conversation with Colton, and it occurred when he was just two months old. It was basically a video of him babbling into the camera, using his hands while he talked. I made a joke and threw up the caption: “Conversations with Colton, look at my Italian Boy already talking with his hands.” I’m 100 percent Italian, and it’s true, we do talk with our hands. Colton is only 50 percent Italian, but it still counts.
Read more about Conversations with Colton here!
I had no recollection of that post until researching for this book. Somehow, my conversations with Colton became regular Facebook posts. The older he got, the more in depth our conversations grew. The older he grew, the more interesting our conversations got! The more interesting our conversations got, the more I started to pray for patience.
When he was about two, he locked his father out of the house, and it was hilarious as I told the story on Facebook. I was still inside with him and took a photo of him standing on a stool after locking his daddy out with a huge grin of accomplishment on his face. See, he looks so proud of himself.
My Facebook friends nudged me to write a book…
The comments from my social media following on this post were full of, “Julie, you need to write a book about Colton.” I heard this over and over and over, over the last five years, and I never took the comments seriously. Obviously, I know my child is special, but I never imagined others would be interested in our conversations.
When we celebrated Colton’s seventh birthday in August of 2022, I finally told the full story surrounding his miracle birth to my friends. The eight months leading up to his birth were hard for me mentally and physically. I didn’t post about our issues on social media. But when I had the courage to post his full birth story, it was almost like I was hit by a bolt of lightning. I needed to share this story. That’s how we ended up here.
I have no expectations of what will ever become of Conversations with Colton, and you know what? That is okay.
I’ve run from this book for years, but I’ve stopped running.
And now I feel at peace.
The thing is what I set out to write and what I ended up writing are two different things. My goal was to tell you a few funny stories and tell you about the miracle of Colton’s birth, and that would be it—a super fun, quick read about a quirky boy with a big personality, who doctors thought wouldn’t be born alive. In my mind, that made for a fun story. After all, it was about a feel-good miracle. But since I had always documented Colton’s stories, putting them together in a cohesive manner was rather easy. But what happened when I started writing is something that I wasn’t prepared for.
I realized I had a greater message to share. And while, yes, this is a compilation of fun stories about a miracle baby, the message is so much greater. One thing all my Facebook posts had in common, other than the hashtag “conversations with Colton,” was this tag line: “All of the fear, faith, and doubt that got us to this moment was 100 percent worth it.”
Seven years ago, I had no idea that I would continue conversations with Colton and would acknowledge so prevalently that all the fear, faith, and doubt that got us to this moment was 100 percent worth it. I’m so thankful to have a healthy seven-year-old and I’m thankful for my Facebook friends who totally embraced our conversations and encouraged me to actually write the book!
Ready to read more?
Following along with my book writing journey