Write Your Own Damn Story

She failed English. Multiple times. She grew up poor in a town you've never heard of, in a family where nothing was handed to you and everything had to be earned the hard way. Nobody gave her a roadmap, a trust fund, or permission.

She built it anyway.

Write Your Own Damn Story is the raw, real, and sometimes profane memoir-meets-battle-plan from Dee Yates - lifelong entrepreneur, photographer, publisher, author, and speaker. Over decades, Dee built multiple businesses from the ground up, turned a $600 Costco camera into a photography career, launched and ran a successful women's magazine, published Cowgirl Culture, California - a fine art book preserving Western heritage - and acquired Ropers Sports News, a 58-year-old legacy publication known as "The Roping Bible," transforming it into a glossy magazine while going toe-to-toe with a good old boys' club that never wanted her there.

None of it came easy. She lost everything and rebuilt from zero. She walked into rooms where she wasn't welcome and made them make space. She bought businesses without business degrees and created doors when every other one was slammed shut.

This book is the companion to Dee's motivational keynote - part memoir, part tactical roadmap. Every chapter delivers a hard-earned lesson and a challenge designed to push you to act. There's no theory here, no corporate fluff, no hand-holding. This is what actually works, from someone who has actually done it.

If you're a woman building something in an industry that wasn't built for you - if you're done waiting for permission that's never coming, done playing small to make other people comfortable, done asking for validation from people who never built a damn thing - this book is for you.

Nobody is coming to save you. Nobody is going to hand you the life you want. The permission you've been waiting for doesn't exist, so stop waiting and start building. Your story won't write itself.

Fair warning: there will be grammatical errors. There will not be excuses.