In This Episode

Project Dollar. Ever elusive, often spoken of, but yet to be published. I have to admit – this project has been in development hell. Coming up, a long-needed update on Project Dollar.

Show Credits

ApexThis podcast is hosted, produced, mixed, edited & music by Mark.

Transcript

About Project Dollar

ApexThis is an indie publishing house self-generating its own projects. Or for short–my publishing imprint. Project Dollar is to be the first official project for ApexThis while technically not being that first project. Project Dollar will be a speculative memoir. What this means is that it will focus on personal finance and budgeting based on my experience and relationship with money with fantastical elements. Now, why has it been in development hell?

Make It A Podcast

At one point in time, Project Dollar was a blog. And from that blog, I gave small speeches about personal finance and budgeting relaying my experiences, and tactics I used to crawl out of debt. Through the act of creating my first podcast, I figured that this would be a great way to transform the blog content I had written. I decided to make it a podcast.With the decision made, I took all my blog posts, looked them over and marked the ones that would be great episodes and others that needed to be updated. As I delved further into the finance community and pondering attending Fincon, I began having doubts about my approach. I wondered if I really wanted to do a podcast about budgeting. The things I was blogging and giving speeches about were a particular moment in my life and how I overcame it. Podcasting seemed ongoing and the more I thought of it as continuous, the more unappealing the idea became.

How About An E-Book?

Wavering on the idea of Project Dollar being a podcast, I began to favor writing an ebook instead. This was an easy decision as it was something I was wanting to do at some point. I also thought that this would not be difficult and may have even portrayed this in past episodes. With existing content, and having performed a preliminary review, I thought that writing this as an ebook would be a walk in the park. I truly thought I knew what I was doing.I took the existing blog posts, outlined the ebook with them, and began to expound upon the blog posts. This part, at least, was a bit easier for me. I’ve been heavily writing non-fiction and technical writing documents and this ebook was not creative writing therefore, it was safe.Poor planning became apparent as I began to find gaps in the content that I was writing. In addition, some of the blog posts needed to be rewritten entirely. As I organized each post into chapters, the more problems I found.

Maybe It Really Should Be A Podcast

At times, I’ve definitely lamented on my thoughts of doing a podcast or book for Project Dollar. After deciding for it to be an ebook and restructuring the content, it seemed like it could actually work as a limited series podcast, based on the ebook. And because I enjoyed audio so much, I wanted to do a bit more.Here is where vignettes were added. The ebook and podcast would cover your basic A-Z type of information and I wanted my ebook to be a little different. Especially if I wanted some version of this as audio. Vignettes would play that part in adding short narrative clips in between episodes. These narrative clips would set up the theme for the episode with characters and other story elements. The more I played with this idea, the more I liked it.

theme is what your story is illuminating about real life.