The gurus of marketing say you need a separate platform for everything.
Because your audiences are different. My fantasy readers might not want to hear about my travel adventures or vice versa. I’ve put so much effort into creating separate platforms that I haven’t really been keeping up with any of them.
So I say screw that.
This blog is my home. So sure, I’ll talk more about my writing, but how about some updates about the crazy overland trip my husband and I have been on, what it is like to write on the road, and why I have a 12” wok in my limited space Landcruiser (and why it is named Nemo). Doesn’t that sound like so much more fun than radio silence? 😀
For those who don’t know, I left my full time, career-type job two years ago on my 42nd birthday. I’ve always been difficult to buy presents for as I want things like more time or a bestseller on Amazon. You know, those sort of things that give significant people in your life panic attacks because they can’t exactly BUY that. Well, maybe they could but probably not worth the price tag!
So I gave myself a great big scary awesome present of chucking the job I’d grown to hate though tried my best to perform and went with the wild idea of wandering the country best suited to lost teenagers still trying to figure out what they want to be (which we all really are at heart, aren’t we? Just adults are better at pretending that radical, bold, and lost person isn’t locked inside).
When I met my husband way, way back (seriously, how have nearly two decades gone by???), we dated on the docks and shores of Martha’s Vineyard. We’d walk by the massive sailboats and houseboats in Oak Bluffs and talk about our future travels. Then we got married, got jobs, picked up some dogs (our version of kids), just got busy and tried to fit all those immense dreams into two-week vacations.
At my job, all of my co-workers had use or lose days at the end of the year and would take weeks off or donating leave. Me? I was crying because my vacation time seemed to dwindle paycheck to paycheck and I struggled to come up with two weeks straight to take a trip that required at least four to do.
Then I started writing. See, you knew I’d sneak writing in somewhere!
I loved it. After decades of not knowing what my passion was, I found it. I can’t say such a discovery is all rosy. Writing takes TIME. Lots of time and I struggled to find enough to do the other things I loved already like hiking and motorcycling. So yeah, let’s throw in another thing I wanted, needed, and loved to do. Why not?
Somehow I managed to stick with the writing thing for years and keep the spouse. But eventually, something had to go and free up some time for those dreams before I regretted never having done them. So I tossed the job.
My husband and I have been on the road or visiting family for the last two years. It is a strange adventure, deserving of its own slightly fantastical novel.
Right now, I’m sitting on a small back road in Texas, waiting for a train that I can’t see either end of to get a move on so we can continue. This is after stumbling into a Chuckwagon cook-off at a campground on Ute Lake in New Mexico over the weekend where we met some great folks from Russell with Cocklebur Camp who gave me sourdough starter from 1939 (please don’t let me kill it before I manage to give some to my mom who can keep anything alive and growing but who didn’t pass that gene on to me), to Jill, a fellow traveler touring on a Ural motorcycle currently in her fifth year of travel.
That is my life now, a ribbon that connects amazing places, some rough moments, and touches the lives of so many people. And during it all, I’m still sneaking away to write. Because that is what gets me up in the morning and what I think about all day, at least on some level. They say a writer never stops writing, and it is true! It just doesn’t always make it to paper. But I store every thought and experience.
And now I’ll try to share some of them with you.