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1106 Design, LLC

Dear Author,

You worked hard to write your manuscript, and you know that expert assistance is needed to ready it for the market. But perhaps you didn’t realize that working with a publisher is no longer necessary—especially publishers who charge fees to produce your book upfront and "share" more of your revenue whenever a book is sold.

1106 Design is an author services company that has served over 4,000 authors since 2001. We offer all the editorial and design services you’d expect from a publisher, transforming your manuscript into a polished book. But here's the difference: we help you secure print-on-demand printing and worldwide distribution in YOUR name. This means you'll earn several dollars more for every book sold instead of a meager “royalty” and never lose control of your book or your book files.

We understand that your book is not just a passion project but also a potential source of income. No two books or authors are alike. That's why we'll customize a package of services tailored to your needs at affordable prices, starting at $5,555. And here's the best part: after this one-time investment, every penny of revenue from book sales is deposited directly to your bank account, never to ours first.

If this sounds like a better way to publish your book, I invite you to browse our services, design samples, no-surprises pricing, outstanding customer reviews, and educational articles at https://1106design.com. You can download a free PDF of my book, "Publish Like the Pros: A Brief Guide to Quality Self-Publishing and an Insider's Look at a Misunderstood Industry," and request a free, no-obligation consultation.

1106 Design is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau. We are a “Highly Recommended Expert” at IngramSpark.com and rated "Excellent" at Alli, The Alliance for Independent Authors, at SelfPublishingAdvice.org. Alli's "watchdog list" of the best and worst publishing services companies is an invaluable resource.

How can we serve you today?

Sincerely,
Michele DeFilippo, owner

Service publisher Worldwide All categories

CHAPTER 1
THE MYTH OF NEVER FALLING

There’s a brittle moment when everything stops working. Not with a crash or a scream, just the sound of your own breath filling a room that suddenly feels too big.

For me, it was a phone call.

I had just graduated. I was lying on my bed in Valparaíso, Chile, staring at the ceiling. My parents were on the line, asking me what was next. Their voices were kind. I don’t remember the exact words; I just remember the silence in between—the weight of it, the way it stretched. I could feel something unraveling, like the thread holding me upright had been tied to an anchor, and someone had just cut the line.

Two years earlier, I had launched Blumee. It was supposed to change the publishing world, to give writers a launchpad before they reached the big leagues. It was idealistic, maybe naïve. But I believed in it. And more than that, I believed in myself for believing in it. I was twenty-two, still in engineering school, still convinced that if I moved fast enough, thought hard enough, and worked late enough, something would click… that the world would notice.

And for a while, it looked like it could work. Friends were excited. Writers signed up. I kept adding features, redesigning, rewriting copy. Every update felt like a step closer to something real. I obsessed over every detail: polished the interface, rewrote the onboarding, tweaked the pitch. I treated every minor win like a sign we were close. It wasn’t just a project. It was the story I told myself about who I was becoming.

But the traction never came. The growth flatlined. I kept telling myself it was just a matter of time; if I pushed harder, stayed up later, and tried something new, it would catch. Until it didn’t. The metrics stalled. The momentum died. All that remained was a silence louder than any number I could measure.

That phone call with my parents didn’t end with a fight. There was no drama, just a tacit agreement that it was time to move on. They had supported me for years, but there were younger siblings to care for and realities to face. And I understood. I did. But it still felt like grief: not over the business, but over who I thought I was.

Letting go of a version of myself I wasn’t ready to lose.

I had built my identity around being someone who could figure it out. The kid with a plan. The one who saw around corners. And suddenly, I was just another recent grad with no traction, no income, and a failed dream. I didn’t know how to rest without guilt. I didn’t know how to stop without feeling like I had quit. So I didn’t rest. I just self-sabotaged. I filled the space with busyness I didn’t believe in; anything to avoid naming what I really felt.

The week after, I updated my résumé and sent it into the void. I told myself I was being responsible, that I was doing the adult thing. But I wasn’t really present. I was still back there, in that room, holding the weight of everything I hadn’t said out loud. It felt mechanical, like I was moving through the motions of a life I hadn’t chosen. I wasn’t sure if I was making decisions or just following gravity.

I found a job. I showed up. I did what needed to be done, but something in me had gone shut. It was like I’d once believed in magic and then watched it dissolve in daylight, and I didn’t know how to get that feeling back. I went through the motions. I delivered on expectations, but the part of me that used to feel alive when I built something…that part had gone dim.

We tell ourselves stories about ambition. That if you want it badly enough, you’ll never stop. That real hunger doesn’t rest. That the people who make it are the ones who never flinch.

We turn that story into gospel: you need to burn bridges, you need to obsess, you need to chase until there’s nothing left to burn.

And we believe it…until we can’t.

I’ve seen what that story does up close.

Howard Hughes was brilliant: a filmmaker, aviator, and engineer. He broke records and built empires. He pushed past every known limit. His vision was relentless; he revolutionized aviation, producing aircraft that broke speed records. He poured millions into movies that redefined cinema. He didn’t just lead companies; he shaped industries.

Hughes made obsession look like genius. The headlines called him a pioneer. The world applauded his extremes.

Then, at the height of it all, he disappeared into a dark room. He sealed himself off from the world. What started as high standards turned into paralyzing rituals; what began as control became compulsion. He stopped flying, creating, trusting anyone. The man who once lived at the edge of possibility became a prisoner of his own mind, consumed by fears no success could silence.

Hughes didn’t lack discipline; in fact, he had more than most. He embodied the very drive people revere: the work ethic, the focus, the obsession with excellence. But his discipline had no anchor, no margin. And it devoured him. The same fire that built his empire also hollowed him out; Hughes kept pushing long after he should have stepped back. His intensity never let up; over time it drained him. What broke him wasn’t falling short; it was living in a system that treated limits like defects and left no room to recover.

You’d think that when I read about Hughes, I would actually judge him; I didn’t. Instead, I saw myself on it—not in the size of his life, but the turn mine was taking. The slow, burning slide from passion to pressure. From drive to compulsion. The turn you don’t notice until it’s too late: the erosion of the boundaries you swore you’d hold.

We talk about burnout as if it were a bug, something that shows up out of nowhere. We think of it as a glitch, but in reality it’s what happens when your system confuses motion for progress, when you punish yourself in the name of perseverance, when you mistake falling for failure.

It isn’t the stumble that breaks you; it’s the story you tell yourself about it.

After Blumee, I thought I just needed more discipline: a tighter grip, a better schedule, less softness. I thought the reason I broke was because I hadn’t been strong enough; that if I’d been harder, I wouldn’t have cracked; if I’d been stricter, I wouldn’t have drifted.

I was wrong.

The problem wasn’t that I fell. The problem was what I believed about falling.

Discipline, as I had learned it, meant doing hard things without complaint. It meant pushing past fatigue. It meant never missing twice. But that version of discipline had no room for grief. No space for learning. No concept of return. It left no margin for the parts of life you don’t see coming.

And that’s what the word actually meant, long before we weaponized it.

Discipline comes from "discere": to learn, to be a student, to stay close to something worth following. It was never meant to be a whip. It was meant to be a tether: a practice of staying with what matters, even when you step away.

Somewhere along the way, we turned it into punishment. Into shame. Into a scoreboard that resets every time we stumble. We made it rigid; we made it loud. And in doing so, we lost the part that lets us come back. We forgot that real discipline is about returning.

Because that’s the truth nobody teaches: discipline isn’t about never falling.

It’s about how you get back on your feet, how you return to what matters.

Not with shame. Not with punishment. With presence. With clarity. With the belief that coming back still counts. With the trust that the act of returning might matter more than whether you ever drifted at all.

Everybody falls. Everyone misses a step, loses the thread, and forgets what they promised themselves. That’s not weakness… that’s being alive. You don’t need to earn your way back; you just need to find the path again.

Bouncing back matters more than holding pace. Because life isn’t a sprint. It stretches past what you can plan for, past what you can train for. It’s more like a marathon than we realize; no one runs a marathon without slowing down, stumbling, or walking for a stretch. What matters isn’t that you never stop, but that you find your way back into rhythm when you do.

If you’ve ever quit something you cared about or drifted from something that once mattered, this isn’t proof that you’re broken.

It’s proof that you’re human. 

And being human means learning how to begin again.

---

CHAPTER 6
WHEN SYSTEMS BREAK

We were about to throw the orchid away. The roots looked brittle. The leaves had gone soft. The life seemed gone. We’d had it since 2021, a gift from family on the day our dog, Kobe, passed away. It had stayed in our home, unassuming and still, until the moment it began to wilt. And when it did, something old and raw stirred in me.

Kobe wasn’t just a dog. He was a cream-colored Shiba Inu with a bold presence that filled the room, stubborn in that unmistakable Shiba way, loyal with a warmth that felt personal and fiercely his. He’d trot up to strangers with a toy in his mouth, convinced they were already friends. Mischievous but deeply connected, he turned ordinary moments into anchors. Every evening, without fail, he waited by the door until we came back. He wasn’t a pet I happened to have. He became part of the structure of our life, woven into the shape of our routines, the steady flow of our days, and even the weight of the silences between us. I didn’t realize how much of our world rested on his presence until the day he wasn’t there to fill it.

I’d grown up around dogs. I understood how to love them, but they were family dogs—shared, cared for by everyone, always someone else’s ultimate responsibility. Kobe wasn’t that. He depended entirely on me. For food. For walks. For knowing how to settle him when he got too hyper. We shaped our days around each other. Without even noticing it, I began structuring my life around the way I showed up for him. I gave up things I wouldn’t have changed for anyone else. I rearranged plans; I learned his patterns. People talk about a soul dog. Not just a companion who fits into your life, but one who rewires it. The rare animal whose presence reaches further than affection and leaves a mark that reshapes who you are. Kobe was that for me. He didn’t simply settle into my routines. He changed the way I moved through my life. He anchored parts of me I hadn’t even known were unsteady.

In early 2021, I was engaged to my now-wife. We were holding our wedding plans together in the wreckage COVID had left behind, trying to make sense of a world that still felt uncertain. One night in January, we stepped out for what felt like the smallest thing—picking up our Save the Date cards. It was supposed to be quick, the type of errand you forget by the next morning. But when we came back, Kobe wasn’t at the door. That had never happened. My wife walked in first. I heard her say his name—sharp, edged with something I didn’t recognize until I saw it for myself. When I reached the living room, she was kneeling beside him. He was lying on the floor. Completely still. She told me there was a chip bag over his head and that she took it out. We rushed him to the ER. Nothing they did could bring him back.

When we returned home, everything sat exactly as we’d left it. His toys were scattered across the floor. His bed waited in its corner. His bowls stayed lined up in the kitchen. The house still carried every trace of him, but none of his life. I stood there, clutching the kind of irrational hope grief always brings, the hope that maybe all of this wasn’t real, that it wasn’t happening. That maybe if I waited long enough, I’d hear him coming down the hallway; that I’d hear the sounds his little paws would make when he walked to our room. That hope made the loss sharper. He hadn’t faded away. He had been here, and then—in one irreversible moment—he wasn’t. The silence didn’t ease its way in. It dropped like a weight.

The orchid came the next day. A gift from family. I placed it on a shelf and said nothing. I wasn’t ready to explain why I couldn’t stop looking at it. But I didn’t let it go. It became more than a plant. It felt like the last living thread connecting me to something I couldn’t bear to release. A fragile reminder of a bond I didn’t know how to name. When we found Kobe like that—when I saw him—I turned everything inward. I replayed every step of that night in my mind. How long we’d been gone. How careful we should have been. Every tiny choice that could have changed the outcome. It didn’t register as a random tragedy. It felt like I had failed him. And I carried that. Not as a wound I expected to heal, but as a responsibility I didn’t want to escape. I didn’t try to bury it. I didn’t even try to explain it away. I let it settle inside me, a private vow that I wouldn’t let something fall through my hands again.

That’s why the orchid mattered. It wasn’t just a plant. It became Kobe’s thread back into my life. A living symbol of something I refused to lose twice. So when it began to wilt, I felt that same panic all over again. The fear wasn’t just about the orchid; it was the fear that I was failing him once more. And I wouldn’t let that happen.

But nothing I knew seemed to work. My routines—the ones that kept every other plant alive—fell apart when I needed them most. Watering on a schedule. Checking for sunlight. The usual adjustments. The systems I had relied on didn’t hold. The orchid didn’t care how well they’d worked before. The moment it mattered, everything I thought I could trust came undone. The rhythms I leaned on disappeared. The habits I thought were dependable fell flat. That’s when I realized I couldn’t hold on to what had worked before. I couldn’t just tighten my grip on old knowledge. If I wanted to keep this living thing alive, I had to start fresh. The person I used to be would’ve let it die and called it a lesson. But I wasn’t that person anymore.

The old system wasn’t built for this. It worked fine when nothing fragile depended on it, when routine was enough, and when nothing tested its edges. But when it mattered, it cracked. That’s how most systems fail. They seem fine, right until they aren’t. They hold together until you actually need them. And by the time they break, it’s already too late.

I didn’t patch the cracks or try to force the system to stretch. I built something softer around it. I stopped tracking; I quit counting days; I started checking the orchid’s moisture by hand; I misted it when it needed misting. I let go of the idea that I had to control the outcome. I wasn’t trying to manage it anymore; I was trying to care for it. But the turning point came when I realized I needed to learn. That’s when I discovered sphagnum moss. I hadn’t even known it existed. I learned how it holds moisture without suffocating roots and how it shields a plant’s base while it heals. I figured out how to use it: how to pack it with care; how to build a soft barrier where growth could happen again. And slowly, the orchid came back. It wasn’t because I found the perfect plan. It was because I stayed with it long enough to learn what it actually needed.

Caring for the orchid became less about managing it and more about showing up when it needed me—not with a plan, not as a project, just presence. I built a steady rhythm around its care and let it fold naturally into my days. I stopped tracking my efforts or keeping score. I let go of the pressure to earn my way back. I gave up the idea that it needed to thrive on my terms. The orchid survived because I made space for it to heal. At the same time, without realizing it, I was starting to learn how to care for myself in the same way—how to show up without chasing perfection, how to return without turning every slip into a debt I thought I had to repay. The system I’d built fell apart. The reason I kept returning didn’t. I learned how to meet it on different terms.

I’ve seen this happen in software. The systems that survive aren’t the rigid ones; they’re the ones that flex. The ones that absorb pressure without falling apart. Fragile systems snap; the ones built to last learn how to bend. I wasn’t thinking about habits or discipline; I was just trying to keep something alive. But looking back, I see it clearly. I was building a way of living that could hold together, even when everything else shifted. What I missed for years is this: a system doesn’t have to be flawless. It just needs to be something you can return to.

Systems don’t collapse with fireworks. They weaken in the places you don’t check, the seams you thought would hold. A missed check, a silent failure, a fallback that never triggers. They fail where your attention isn’t. Life follows the same pattern. Most failures don’t arrive with an explosion; they fade into absence. Habits aren’t lost because you fought them, but because you lost the path back in. A short break stretches longer than you planned. By the time you return, the rhythm is gone. The welcome is gone. Only resistance waits, and hesitation adds another day, then another. Rhythms rarely disappear at once; they slip away when you stop noticing.

Burnout isn’t quiet; it comes like a roar. A calendar turns into a cage. Goals twist into accusations. The systems you trusted grow cold. Even brushing your teeth feels like a fight. You haven’t stopped caring; what failed is the care built into the system.

That’s when force no longer works. What helps is grace: a system that leaves space for you when you’ve been gone. I used to build for stability; now I build for recovery. I ask which shape of a habit will still feel like home after a hard week, which practice can bend without snapping, which path still shines clear enough to follow back in.

Sometimes it’s a glass of water, sometimes a voice note in place of a journal, sometimes a misting of the roots, because the fragile part isn’t me; it’s what I’m protecting. And I’m still in this race.

No one tells you this part. You learn how to return, you get better at it. You start trusting your rhythm again, and then, eventually, the system you built starts to slip. The routine begins to crack. The pace you counted on falters. It won’t look like a breakdown. It’ll look like drift.

That’s when you learn the truth. Discipline isn’t about building a system that never breaks; it’s about deciding what you’ll do when it does. It’s stepping forward when nothing feels certain; it’s showing up without a plan. It’s staying with it, not because you have a flawless strategy, but because you’ve learned how to return. You don’t need complexity to stay consistent. You need a way back in.

Even when you know how to return, you won’t always take the first step right away. Emotion always gets there first. But the door you built for yourself will stay open, waiting for you to walk through it again. And that’s where the next chapter begins.

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