Red Bull, Rose from Titanic, and Rogue Thinking

People that anyone gives a damn about are relatable humans. The ones where you read their work or hear them talk and you're nodding your head going “me too, girl, me too” or “I feel you, boo.”

It's Friday morning. Three cups of coffee in. This blog was supposed to be done an hour ago and instead my brain had a business epiphany, so here we are.

Back up a second.

We wrote the positioning doc this week. It's the brand deck for the book — who it's for, what it does for her, why this book gets to exist and why I'm the one writing it. It's the north star. Everything else — pitch paragraph, back cover copy, query letter — gets built off of it.

Turning something this big into something this concise is hard AF. It took an entire session to land one sentence. One.

I'm not sharing it yet. But once it landed, it landed hard.

We locked it, and now I'm putting my head down to finish the other docs before I hand this to anyone. The medical professional in me is thorough AF and cannot have a half-assed, inaccurate representation floating around out there. I know this isn't life or death stakes. But when I send an agent a query letter, I want that bitch to land like a mother f'er. Not “meh, it's okay, next.”

Then, because one epiphany a week is never enough, my brain had another one.

I've spent years thinking my medical business side and my Becca side couldn't fully coexist. Like I had to pick. Healthcare-credible, evidence-based, doesn't-get-to-guess Becca, or funny, unfiltered, snapback-tatted-cussing-in-a-pitch-deck Becca. My family jokes about it like the two of them are in an ugly custody battle.

They're not. They're just both me.

Same person. Same room, most days.

Jacob is a full Star Wars, Magic the Gathering, buried-in-his-IT-brain husband, and somehow that works great with whatever I am. Nobody looks at us and says pick a lane. Opposites don't cancel each other out. They build something better than either one alone.

The business idea that happened this morning is GEN-I-US. Major aha moment — not just for what my eventual offerings will actually be, but for how to mix Harvard Becca and interesting Becca into one thing without doing either one dirty.

Salad, donut, and a beer, same meal. Don't @ me. The calories balance out eventually and I will not be taking questions.

People that anyone gives a damn about are relatable humans. The ones where you read their work or hear them talk and you're nodding your head going “me too, girl, me too” or “I feel you, boo.” Really, they're just saying what everyone else is already thinking. Saying the inside voice out loud. Oversharing on purpose. And by proxy, that gives everyone else inadvertent permission to do the same thing.

So. Quiet part, out loud: today is weird AF.

No one's nagging us to get to the lake to soak in the UV index at a certain time, or asking for more worms and a Red Bull from the gas station, or being hungry. It's odd. Jacob and I are legit talking about heading to Lowe's to get more wood for the chicken coop he's building me — and if that doesn't make me Titanic granny, I don't know what does.

I miss the chaos. I'm going to be a genuinely shitty empty nester one day.

Mom worry mode is a hard habit to put down even when everybody's fine and having a great time somewhere else without me. I know that. Doesn't stop me from doing the math on it anyway.

Fireworks went off last night and my brain, completely unprompted, did the Old Rose voice from Titanic.

It's been 84 years...

Math check — it has not been 84 years. It's been five since I walked out of corporate, and this book has eaten basically that entire five years. Writing it. Un-writing it. Rewriting it. Adding a cuss word back in that got cut in edits.

I've spent this whole time telling y'all to share your voice and say it how it is. Slower than I'd like. Messier than I'd like. But I'm doing it too.

MANUSCRIPT STATS

✅ 19/19 chapters. Check.

✅ 56,747 words, 137 pages. Check.

🔄 Phase 4: positioning doc locked. Pitch paragraph, back cover copy, query letter still cooking.

📚 Literary nonfiction. Not memoir. Don't @ me on this one either.

👀 Agent research kicking off soon.