A Treat For Yourself on Black Friday

Seeing how it's rapidly approaching Christmas, I'm going to indulge in a shameless little plug of my new book. Below, you'll find a copy of the introduction from the book. I think it will best tell you what the book is all about. If you're dreaming of going cruising this book is for you. If you've been cruising and are temporarily or permanently land-bound, this book is also for you. If you have family or friends that just don't get why in the world you would even think of doing something like this, buy them this book. It makes a great Christmas gift.

As with any of our writing, we've always promised that we would tell it like it is, the good, bad and the ugly. This book is no different. In it, I lay bare my soul. I hope that it touches you as deeply as the writing of it touched me. If you read it and it means something to you, please leave a review on Amazon. It's impossible to emphasize how much reviews mean to self-published authors. And, as always, I welcome your feedback.

Introduction

Selling everything and sailing off into the sunset is a dream for many who, like I once did, live a life of unsatisfying work. It's a search for something more, some deeper meaning to life than the 9-5 grind. But leaving a life I knew to embark on a life wholly unfamiliar was hard work. It takes so much time and effort that in cruising circles it's known as the “five year plan.” We were actually fortunate to depart almost exactly 6 years after our initial decision to go.

Unless you've sailed your whole life, and the departure to a full-time life on the sea is just an extension of that experience, the learning curve is steep. We had never sailed or owned a boat before we decided to do this and we were suddenly caught up in a whirlwind of classes, how-to books, and an unending list of online forums full of experts eager to offer advice. My kitchen counter became Command Central with countless to-do lists (many of which had large dollar values in the cost column) neatly arranged in order of priority.

Balancing the end of one existence with the beginning of a new life rapidly became overwhelming. Our departure day brought no relief. The first year or two of this new life was immersion school, a hard-earned lesson learned nearly every day. My illusive and somewhat hazy concept of paradise felt distant. In its place I found an unnerving sense of uncertainty, fear of failure, and that mind-numbing blankness in the face of too much information. Every moment was dedicated to figuring out the “how” of this new life. The shelf in the living room grew full of books to guide us through the “how” of buying a boat and establishing a life on the water, but as the departure date approached, I began to lose touch with the very reason I was choosing to make this significant change in the first place. 

Five years into our new life, as I was cleaning out my photo folder, I was surprised that in spite of my preoccupation with figuring out how to make it all work, my photos had captured those moments that singularly defined the “why” of my journey. I began to collect them and to attempt to capture their essence in the written word. This book is a collection of those moments that most accurately portray why I felt compelled to live a meaningful life with the sea.

If you would like to read a review before you buy, here are several:

Ellen Jacobson

Ardys Richards

Keith Davie

Two Books...One Boat...Two Views...One Mind

The blog has been uncharacteristically quiet for the last couple of months.  Part of the reason is that we've been sitting still in Beaufort, SC and there hasn't been much to talk about. But the real reason is that our writing energies have been going elsewhere...to new books.

It's an odd thing that each of us were writing new books separately and yet, somehow, managed to finish them both at the same time. As any of you who have written anything of any length know, those last few weeks before release are a flurry of edits and re-reads to the point that you have difficulty even focusing on the words. With each edit you think you're done, only to have a proofreader find yet another typo or formatting mistake. At long last, though, both are finished. And that brought up a whole new issue – how to release two such different books at the same time.

 I posed the question to a Women Who Sail writing group that I belong to, some of whom suggested that we should stagger the releases to allow for sufficient attention to each one. Great idea, but we wanted both books out in time for the Christmas gift giving season so there's insufficient time to do separate releases. Then there was the idea of setting up a marketing contest of sorts, allowing our readers to choose which book they wanted released first. After thinking about it, I realized I didn't want to pit our works against each other in such a way.

The longer I mused, the more I realized that the situation embodied our relationship. One of the reasons we have succeeded in cruising for so long is that we get along really well. We are a melded unit of nearly fifty years, with the kind of relationship that allows complex thoughts to pass between us with just a glance and a smile. Though we share that kind of bond, we also allow each other space to be independent characters, are happy in our own skins, and content to sit, sometimes for days, in total silence in each other's company. The new books are our individual reflections on two different subjects, reflections of two different individuals who happen to share a small boat as a living space.

Tj's is a short little book reflecting on the ways in which learning how to play a ukulele at age 63 changed his perception of the world around him. The uke was gifted to him by four of our grand kids nearly a year ago, and the book was birthed by far-ranging philosophical discussions between Tj and our eldest daughter about those changes. She – the poet writer – encouraged him to write them down, and Learning From a Uke – a small book for a small instrument was born. It's a short little book, thought-provoking and honest, that touches a bit on the difficulties of aging gracefully and the joys of learning something new at any age. It's one you can pick up over and over, each time finding something new.

My book came about because I was cleaning out and sorting the thousands of photos in my computer pictures folder the day after having another of the discussions we often have with new cruisers about how to get started. As I browsed through the photos, remembering those years of preparation prior to embarking on this adventure, many of them reminded me how easy it was to get totally wrapped up in the “how” of accomplishing it, and to lose sight of why I was doing it in the first place. I began to gather those in a folder and to write a short bit about each one. Being a writer, I wanted to capture in words the essence of this lifestyle that the photos captured so well. The Essence is a collection of those photos and vignettes that touch on what it means to me to live this life with the sea.

Both books are available in Kindle and print format; the print formats make for great holiday gifts. If you do read them, please leave a review on Amazon. It can't be emphasized enough how important reviews are to self-published writers. We also love to hear from our readers, so feedback is greatly appreciated – it's the way we learn to write better, and learning something new to improve yourself is always a welcome thing.

We hope that you take from them as much as they have given us in the writing of them.