Author Accelerator Member Spotlight: Mark Halpert

Celebrating a writer’s success

Jade @ Author Accelerator
No Blank Pages
2 min readMay 2, 2018

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Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

We’d like to introduce Mark Halpert, one of our Author Accelerator members. Mark recently finished his first draft and we invited him to sit down for a little interview to talk about his experience. So without further ado, here is Mark!

Q: Okay, Mark, can we have the basics about your project and your book coach?

Mark: My book is Saturn Return, a travel memoir. I worked with book coach, Dawn Ius for the past 6 months.

Q: How does it feel to have finished?

Mark: I feel that no matter what happens now, it is written. I have edits to do, but the story is all there. That feels really good. It’s not haunting me!

Q: What did you do to celebrate?

Mark: Went out for Indian food. A lot of the story happened in India.

Q: What are your next steps?

Mark: Going through my coach’s comments and editing. Now it’s time to make it really good!

Q: Why would you recommend coaching to get to a finished draft?

Mark Halpert and his book coach, Dawn Ius

Mark: My coach is like a really smart mirror. She understands what I’m thinking and trying to do and bounces it back at me with more clarity. She’s encouraging and kind. I think that receiving regular professional feedback on a per-chapter basis is an excellent way to get a draft completed. It keeps things rolling.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us, Mark. And again, congrats on your huge accomplishment!

Sometimes, a fun little bonus to coaching is that you get to meet your coach in person! Mark and his book coach met in person and had a great time talking about his future goals for his project.

Originally published at medium.com on May 2, 2018.

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