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A Long Hard Road
Paperback
Entertainment & Performing ArtsMusiciansSelf-Help
Publisher Price: $11.99
Publisher: Otter Creek Digital Studios
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.27 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Tom Sykes spent much of his life chasing a dream that never quite had the decency to behave itself.
He wanted a creative life. What he got was music, film, television, business, songwriting, family responsibilities, unexpected opportunities, painful failures, reinventions, some spectacularly bad timing, and enough near misses to make a sensible person take up gardening.
At times, he did walk away.
The dream, apparently, was not informed.
A Long Hard Road is about what happens when the life you imagined when you were young runs headfirst into the life that actually shows up.
This is not the story of somebody who picked a goal, stayed relentlessly focused, ignored all the doubters, and finally proved everybody wrong. If that had happened, this would be a much shorter book.
Instead, the dream changed.
So did Tom.
There were successes, sometimes big ones, but they rarely looked the way he thought they would. Doors opened unexpectedly. Others slammed shut. Some opportunities came too late. A few disappeared before he completely understood what they might have become.
And there were years when the life he was actually living seemed to have very little to do with the one he had pictured when he was young.
But something kept coming back.
The need to make something.
Write a song. Tell a story. Make a film. Start something new. See what might still be possible.
Somewhere along the way, though, the question changed.
It stopped being, Will I ever get there?
And became, Where exactly was 'there' supposed to be?
What if the dream had changed?
What if success was no longer about becoming the person you thought you were going to be?
And what if the detours, failures, victories, wrong turns, near misses, and strange little episodes weren't interruptions to the story?
Maybe they were the story.
Funny, candid, and sometimes painful, A Long Hard Road is about hanging onto a dream long enough to discover that it may not end up looking anything like the one you started with.
And if you've ever looked back at the person you once planned to become and thought, Well, that went differently, you may recognize more of yourself in this story than you expected.
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