The Year I Stopped Explaining Myself

A Coffee On A Yacht Entry, From The Galley Table

It started in 2020 because I was tired of explaining myself.

Not in a dramatic way. In the small way. The same five questions from clients, week after week, about Shopify settings I could write out in my sleep. Shipping zones. Tax setup. Product variants. The little things that block a brand new store owner for three days and cost me a thirty minute call to undo.

So I wrote it down. All of it. The first book was not called Shopify Made Easy because there was no series yet. It was just a book. One book. I printed it at 7x10 inches because 6x9 felt too much, too thick, too intimidating for someone who had just decided this week that they wanted to sell online. A 7x10 book sits flat next to a laptop. It feels like a working manual, not a lecture.

Life was simple then.

A year later I went to update it and the publishing app I was using had quietly removed the 7x10 trim size. Six by nine was the only option that worked. The book had also grown, the way books do when you actually know more than you did the year before. So I split it. One book became two. Two became three. And that is how a series accidentally starts. Not from a grand plan. From a missing trim size and too much new material.

We still have three main books in the core line. I keep adding around them.

Last Year Cost Me Seven Months

Updating those books in 2025 took me seven months. Seven. I finished the last one and immediately started on the 2026 versions, because I had learned the lesson. If you wait until December to begin the next year's update, you are already a year behind your own platform.

So this year I started early. And then January 2026 happened. And February. And March. And every week one more AI tool, one more Shopify feature, one more agentic commerce announcement, one more thing that meant the chapter I finished on Tuesday needed a rewrite by Friday.

January 2026 looks nothing like April 2026. I have written that sentence into a book chapter and a blog post and a LinkedIn caption already this year, and it is still true every time.

What Actually Changed

The honest part. The part I want to write down before I forget what it felt like to do this the old way.

I have been in eCommerce since 2000. I have been using machine learning tools since long before anyone called them AI. I am not a late arrival to this conversation. But the last twelve months have changed how I do my own work in a way the previous twenty five years did not.

Research is the cleanest example. Before AI, research meant Google. A lot of Google. Open twelve tabs. Read three articles from people whose work I trusted. Cross check against a Shopify help doc. Save the good ones to a folder I would never open again. Repeat the next time the same question came up because I could not find the folder.

Now research is a conversation. I still go to the trusted sources. I still cross check. I still bookmark the people whose work has earned the bookmark. The difference is that the synthesis happens in minutes instead of hours, and what comes out the other end is already in my voice and ready to go into a chapter or a blog or a client proposal.

I also use AI for formatting. For pulling my own scattered thoughts back into context when I have been jumping between four client stores in a morning. For checking whether I have repeated myself across two chapters, which I do, because four and a half languages will do that to your brain. The half is French. The French only flows when I am actually in France.

When you grew up working in Afrikaans and German and you have to find the English word for something at speed, your grammar gets a little discombobulated. Ask Claude. Claude has met my grammar.

The thing nobody tells you about working with AI well is that the work has to already be yours. The voice. The framework. The opinions. The twenty five years of bookmarks. AI does not give you those. It just stops them from leaking out the bottom of your day in admin and formatting and re-explaining and finding the right word in the right language.

The Way I Actually Write Now

It looks like this. I am fixing a client's shipping setup at nine in the morning. I record what I am doing as I do it. The recording becomes a video. The video transcript becomes a blog post the same day. The blog post, three or four of them stitched together, becomes the next chapter update for whichever book the topic belongs to.

Boom. Same day. One piece of client work. Three pieces of content. One book chapter further along.

This used to be the part of the work I dreaded. Writing the proposal. Writing the timeline. Writing the assessment. Writing the documentation. It used to feel like dragging a piano up a flight of stairs every single time. Now I do it in the ten minutes between two client calls, and by lunch I have a draft I can clean up.

The strange thing, and I am still surprised by it, is that the busier I get the more time I seem to have. Because the busy is producing. The busy is not just answering email anymore.

The Book I Am Launching In Word

Here is the part I find funny. I am about to launch my first book of the 2026 cycle, and I am doing the entire thing in Microsoft Word. Not in a publishing app. Word.

Why. Because the books have grown into things with tables and blocks and structured layouts, and the publishing app handles text and images but does not handle tables. So Word it is.

Now if you have not used Word seriously in fifteen years, you will know exactly what I mean when I say I cannot find anything. The menus moved. The page breaks fight me. The styles panel is hidden behind three clicks I did not know existed. This morning I asked Claude to write me the steps to format the book in Word, the proper steps, the kind of steps a real layout designer would charge me for.

Real layout designers charge between six and thirteen cents a word. Read that again. Six to thirteen cents. Per word. I have thirteen books in the line. I will let you do the math, because I do not want to.

This year, doing it myself with a clear set of instructions, is not just faster. It is the difference between launching the books at all and not.

The Domestic Footnote

I owe my husband a public thank you for this part, because credit where credit is due. He has taken over the shopping, the dishes, and some of the cooking this year. That alone has freed up so much time you would not believe it. The tea making has stayed mine, because the tea making is sacred. Hot British tea, ordered from the UK through Amazon, brewed properly. The afternoon glass of wine for the second writing session is also mine (well he pours it).

This is the un-glamorous truth about producing a lot of work. The work happens in the gaps. The gaps only exist if somebody handles dinner.

What I Want To Remember About This Year

That the books grew because the work grew.

That the series happened because of a missing trim size, not a master plan.

That AI did not write my books for me. AI gave me back the hours I used to lose to formatting, repetition, and finding the English word.

That waking up earlier is not productivity advice. It is just the only quiet hour on a yacht before the day starts.

That dusting still has to happen. Not often. But occasionally. The boat does not dust itself, no matter how clever the AI gets.

I will tell you in June how the launch went. For now, the kettle is on.

Veronica
Houston, Texas
From the galley table