Well, hello there!
It’s been over a year since we updated the Blog and I would love to give you a laundry list of reasons why, but in reality…. life overcame us.
There are only so many hours in a day, and we had a LOT of things competing to fill those hours, so the blog took a back seat for a while. After we got on the road, reality set in quickly that full-time nomad life is not as easy as it seems, and I had to tackle the learning curve – or better yet, the learning cliff – of a new job that is outside my strong points, while traveling to remote locations for the new gig which involved the lovely 'Where is the nearest airport?' game. While I was doing that, Nic juggled writing, editing, publishing, advertising, and marketing her books.
It took a while – as the lack of updates can attest – but we have managed to stomp on the ankle biters and learn to be a bit more efficient in our day-to-day activities. In this post I’m going to paint with really broad brushstrokes to catch you up, and I’ll dive into details on some of the more interesting events/places in later posts.
Since this is labeled “A Writers Journey” I’ll hit the writing part first. Nic had self-published the first two books in her series, and even though she was getting fantastic feedback and reviews, the books weren’t selling that well. To be honest, that was due to both of our personalities: we aren’t good at, or like to do, advertising/selling/asking for help. The whole advertising and marketing is foreign to us and it showed. But she stuck with it and was still doing a bit of editing on the side. Then we went to an indie author conference and were introduced to Chris Kennedy, CEO of Chris Kennedy Publishing (CKP), a publishing company. After some discussion and a wholehearted recommendation by Todd McCaffrey (that story is a whole other post later), Chris asked for a copy of Nic’s book. A little while later, Chris asked Nic if she would re-publish the books under the CKP banner, that meant CKP would handle the marketing, advertisement, editing, cover art, and all the other pieces to getting a book out that was kicking her butt and let her concentrate on being an author. It took about a year, but now the first book has been re-edited, new cover art applied and hit the market on June 28, 2023, with the second coming out July 28th and the third on September 1st.
Here are the new covers for the first two books:
While she was doing that a couple of other authors asked her to write some short stories for them. One is published and two more are in the works. On top of that, she started working on translations.
Now the “Journey” part:
Our route Oct '21-Dec '22
Last year we went from central Alabama to Corpus Christi, Texas, up to Colorado, east to Outer Banks, South Carolina, down to the Florida panhandle, and then to south Alabama. We had a great time, saw some interesting stuff, and met some really nice folks.
Along the way we picked up a few tips and tricks, learned how to avoid wildfires, and had a few RV lessons imprinted on our brains (always ensure the dump valves are closed after draining the holding tanks). I was able to figure out the nomadic remote work, the pros and cons of different internet providers, and how to survive tax season while you are in a moving target.
I think I’ll wrap it up here and use the next few posts to highlight the key events we’ve experienced over the last year or so.
Ya’ll stay safe
C.Bit