Florence Philip

Dear Reader, 

Here is my story of how I wrote my first book. 

Earlier this year I had some pretty bad health scares which left a deep wound, due to which I was mostly stuck with bed rest. Kids would go to school every morning and hubby off to work. It was a time of a lot of pain and feeling really low. One such day, I was browsing my laptop and happened to stumble across a spreadsheet of my bucket list which I had for a long time, and reading that list took me back to a time couple of years ago when my mum retired. She was happy about retiring but also worried about what life will be like going forward and how to spend her time fruitfully. 

I sat up in bed, propped with pillows at my back and on my lap to support my laptop. There was a moment of deep thought and something clicked and I started writing (read as ‘typing’), expanding on my bucket list, adding more and more. I didn’t feel tired, I kept going. Hours and hours, weeks after weeks. Thinking, researching, reading blogs, talking to myself, typing, deleting, and editing as I went along. My mind was busy figuring out ideas even during my wound dressing appointments every day at the hospital. Time was also spent on studying the details of getting a book published.

Long story short - after a few months, on 3rd May my book “Relish Your Retirement”, is published on Amazon. I feel good of being able to do something which I always wanted to do, right from my school days. And these weeks and months of recovery which was depressing to start with, was the perfect opportunity to bring out something which was always in the back burner of my mind and was a good distraction to the painful healing period too. 

I have 4 other unfinished manuscripts sitting on my laptop and I never had the nerves to publish. But I had my mum in mind and all precious ladies like her either retired or planning to retire shortly while writing this particular book and hence wanted to make sure I give it my everything and finish it. The aim was to write 101 ideas but ended up with 501 ideas to make a 276-page book. 

This book was written with a lot of love and dedication and a ton of hardwork. I hope you enjoy reading this book :)

Florance x