It’s a little hard to believe, but this book was written accidentally.

How do you accidentally write a book, you ask?

Well, in 2023 the Unionville Curling Club agreed to launch a new league – Open Tag – meant to be a “development” league and a place where people of all experience levels could play. In particular, we hoped to provide a home for people fresh out of our learn-to-curl programs.

I was a big advocate for starting such a league, and agreed to manage it to get it up and running. As part of making it a development league, I thought I would write a “short tip” each week. “Short” for me ended up being an average of 3 pages, and I joked at the end of the year that “if it felt like you’ve read a whole darn book worth of tips this season… it’s because it’s not too far off!” Of course, some people prodded me to go the rest of the way and make it an actual book, and well, here we are.

The Landscape

As much as writing is my job, it’s a lot of work to write and publish a book, even one where you’ve already written two-thirds of the content. Restructuring a collection of random tips, editing and refining them, and re-doing all the figures and photos to be at least a few levels of professional higher is still a lot of work. And I didn’t want to go down that road if it wasn’t going to help somebody — if there were already 10 curling books that would be just as good or better, what would be the point?

However, to my surprise there aren’t that many curling books out there (it’s a bit of a niche sport, but not to that degree). Moreover, none of them have been published since the directional sweeping effect was discovered, which is a big point of interest for many curlers in the “improvers” category. So the opportunity was definitely there, and I believe there is an audience (hopefully you!) for this book.

The Timeline

That joke about reading a whole book worth of tips was of course my end of the season message. The message that comes at the conclusion of the season. The message specifically created because we were in the final days of our club having ice, and regular league play was already at an end.

So if I was going to go ahead with the book project, I had to get moving fast. I worked quickly, using some late nights and any weekend time to prepare a detailed outline of the book: where the existing posts would fit in (even if they had to be reworked), where new chapters would have to be written to fill in the gaps, etc. More importantly, I needed to identify all the possible photos I would need, and go get those taken ASAP before there was no more ice.

Thankfully, I knew Alexis, a talented photographer, through the club. She was willing to work with me on the project, so I created a list of all the photos I thought we would need, and on one of the last days that our club had ice before it was melted down for the summer, we got an hour of ice time to set up and snap photos.

The goal was to then finish the book and get it ready for release before the next curling season.

Because it’s not my first non-fiction instructional book, I knew how important feedback from readers can be (both newbies in the target audience as well as other experts), so I worked quickly in April, May, and June to get a “beta” version of the book ready: all the text drafted or reworked, with some figures and photos still to be tweaked and inserted.

That would give the readers about a month to read through it and provide their feedback, a week or so for me to make changes based on that feedback, and then time to get another round of readers to do it again before the final polish for publication at the end of the summer.

Time Compression

Unfortunately, I had a series of family tragedies in the summer, including a my mom having bad fall down some stairs and ending up in a coma. I naturally shelved any work on the book for several weeks, which meant that the final steps (like setting up this website!) got a little rushed to still get the book out in time for the start of the curling season.

I hope that I was perfectionist enough at the start of the process that even with the rush it’s still a very good product in the end — but if you notice any minor errors (I know there’s at least one photo where I’m making a really goofy face and there was no ice for a re-shoot, and a whole bunch where we didn’t realize we had left our gear in the background of the shot), please be forgiving!