Keeping a Book Afloat Over Several Years
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Sometimes, being a writer can make us feel like we’re standing all on our own, especially if we don’t have a writing community around us.
This can make it even more difficult for us to work on our writing, even if we feel that we have a book inside us that’s ready to be written.
Kimberly J. Ward’s book writing journey started after she went on a real journey, spending two years at sea with her husband and daughter.
But it was the writing community she found at her local library that helped her to write the basis of her book, and the help of others with book know-how that led her to finish and self-publish her book in a single year.
Keeping a Book Afloat Over Several Years, with Kimberly J. Ward
Listen to learn:
- Tips for self-publishing when you’re new to the Indie publishing world
- Why having a writing community is so important
- The value of having an editor you trust, especially when self-publishing
- How a willingness to learn benefits your book
Here’s a sneak peek:
[08:48] And same thing with the book. Some things are huge. Some things are little, like painting your bedroom.
[18:53] I had no idea I would write a book. However, I'm one of those, let's take copious notes about everything I have.
[23:01] It was a perfect opportunity to both be vulnerable and then watch others be very vulnerable. And it was a nice community.
[25:54] So I really struggled with my mindset and that's about where I was when I met you.
[29:03] And one of the things I said is, “I'm growing as a writer.” There's an awful lot I don't know, but there's an awful lot I do know.
[32:20] There were a lot of things. I just had to open myself up and surrender to his knowledge. And I did, and I'm very happy with the product.
[32:32] I know an awful lot of people who are afraid of the editing process. Open yourself up. That person is not there to rip your work apart. They're there to help make it the best you can do.
[34:49] And I just, again, learned from them and kept learning and kept learning. And the perfect part about it is that now I know those things.
Links from today’s episode:
Crew of Three: How Bold Dreams and Detailed Plans Launched Our Family's Sailing Adventure
The Resilient Writers Radio Show: Keeping a Book Afloat Over Several Years, with Kimberly Ward -- Full Episode Transcript
Intro:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because—let's face it—the writing life has its ups and downs, and we wanna not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books, and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who wanna learn and grow in their craft, and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books, and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them, writers who wanna spend more time in that flow state, writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call “the writing life.”
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives, and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda Douglas:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm so excited today to talk to Kimberly J. Ward. Kimberly and I met when she joined one of my Book Finishers Bootcamps, and she's an avid traveler. She has camped her way across the country, across the United States, and she has written, over the years, many, many pages of journals, and she never thought she would finish a book. However, she did.
And I'm holding in my hot little hands—you can't see it, but I'm holding my hot little hands—the gorgeous Crew of Three: How Bold Dreams and Detailed Plans Launched Our Family's Sailing Adventure. So, it's out now. You can find more about Kimberly at kimberlywardwriter.com. So Kimberly, welcome. Thanks for doing this.
Kimberly J. Ward:
Thanks so much for having me.
Rhonda:
So, tell me the story behind the book. Like, what the heck happened to put the three of you, you and your husband and your daughter, on a boat for a very long time. What feels like a long time, to me.
Kimberly:
It felt like a long time to me, too. Two years is a very long time to live on a boat.
Rhonda:
It's a long time. So, how did that happen?
Kimberly:
Well, my husband is a lifelong sailor, and I am a lifelong adventurer. And so when we met, we did many, many of our adventures by boat, but we also went by RV. Two of the camping trips across the United States were by RV. However, we knew that we wanted to do a long sailing trip. For an extended honeymoon, we had sailed up to Nova Scotia, so, not far from you. And we'd spent six weeks on a boat, we loved it, and we knew we wanted to do some adventuring by boat.
When our daughter was eight, we knew we had limited time that she still might really wanna travel with mom and dad before sports and all things teenage started happening. So we started planning it. We opted to rent out our home. We decided on a two-year trip, so we travelled from Massachusetts on the Eastern United States all the way down the East Coast to Florida, then hopped over to the Bahamas, and then island hopped our way down the Eastern Caribbean.
Rhonda:
Wow, so fun. I'm so jealous every time I hear you tell a piece of this story. I get so jealous. So, you're an oyster farmer. You weren’t an oyster farmer then, ‘cause, how do you leave the oysters?
Kimberly:
Well, you certainly wouldn't leave them for two full years. No, my husband and I met as technical consultants. We both implemented Oracle systems, so a very different career path. I had stayed home with my daughter when she was born. Two traveling consultants don't work very well with parenthood in our world.
Rhonda:
Oh, so true.
Kimberly:
I stayed home with my daughter, and my husband continued to do technical consulting. As we planned for the trip, we went back and I took a full-time job in human resources, which was my specialty within the systems.
When we left, our idea was to have a sabbatical cruise where we were not trying to connect with the world and we were not trying to work. So ours entailed two years of savings and changing our ways and selling some of our other toys to enable us to go for two years without working. When we came back, my daughter was in junior high. We had 10 years, give or take, between junior high, high school, and college. And so my husband had planned on going back to technical consulting for 10 years.
After the very first week where he had to wear shoes and socks and pants and sit under fluorescent lights all day long, he came home and we went for a walk and he said, “I don't know that I can do this for 10 more years.” And I got it, you know, we were used to living outside. And so I said, “all right, what do you think you might like to do?” And he said—well, apparently he'd had a lot of time while travelling and alone to think about it because he had a ready answer. He said, “I think I might like to try my hand at some oyster farming.”
We have a little background as we live on the water. We have some very good friends and neighbours who have an oyster farm basically in our backyard. And so he said, “I thought I might offer up my services to Bob, the oyster farmer, for the fall and winter and see if it was something I might like.” I said, “OK, I think I'm going to write.”
So I started writing and he started oyster farming. And I had always thought I had a book in me. I just didn't know what the subject was or the message or if I would ever actually really do it because a lot of us think we might have a book in us. And he started testing the waters of oyster farming and I started writing in a memoir course at the local library.
Rhonda:
Oh, love that. So, tell me a little bit more about getting ready to do this because it's kind of, it's a big thing. Like I've put all of my stuff in storage and travelled around the world for a year. And so I know, like, I know, but I wasn't in charge of my own means of conveyance through the world. It feels to me like a boat is basically like bringing your house with you when you travel. I don't know. Tell me what the planning for something that monumental is like.
Kimberly:
Well, it's interesting. Michael and I, my husband and I, we're both project managers for implementing Oracle systems. It is not dissimilar to planning a project to go live at a very large company. You have your resources. You have your pieces that need to get done, and some need to get done first.
You have your prerequisites that have to get done. And then sometimes you need to get supplies together to get other parts done. So it really resonated with both of us that this was a project. Interestingly, one of the things that kickstarted my writing again, thanks to you during our Book Finishers Bootcamp, was, “your book is your project.”
And if we start to look at just about anything we want to do in life, it is nothing but a big project. Some are bigger than others. You know, some are ginormous, like leaving your house and homeschooling your daughter for two years and moving on to a boat. And same thing with the book. Some things are huge. Some things are little like painting your bedroom.
You know, but it's the very same philosophy. And that was a real mindset shift for me when you said that, but it's absolutely what we did to get onto the boat. Now, my husband came into our partnership as a—we were quite late when we got married, but he was 43 and he had owned his own boats for nearly 20 years by then. So he had kind of that theory of the outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's the 10,000 hours of mastery. He had taken classes, he'd taken every Coast Guard auxiliary class and every power squadron class that he could. He had read all of, you know, there's some Bibles that live aboard sailboats of, you know, diesel mechanics and electricity.
There's some people who have written, and they're well known, you know, they're the experts in their fields. And so he'd read those things and he'd studied those things and he'd practiced those things. So that part of it for me was not—not that I didn't worry about it.
Rhonda:
No, but you knew you were in safe hands.
Kimberly:
I knew I was in pretty good hands. Yes. And I've introduced him as an expert sailor and then as equal parts electrician, plumber, handyman, and diesel and small engine mechanic. Yes, so he comes with those skills. In the learning phase—now there are an awful lot of people who do this who have to also then learn those skills—however, I come in with massive organizational skills. And so I started with the spreadsheets.
We had to move out of our house. Clearly not everything in a 2,000 square foot plus house was going to go on to our 34 foot boat, which is roughly 300 square feet. I started the process of systematically going through the house and figuring out what needs to come, what doesn't need to come. We went through purging.
I'm pretty sure my husband and daughter thought that if they didn't stay out of the way, they might get put out for the goodwill pickup. And one of the nice things is when you live in a very small space, and anyone who lives in a tiny house or on an RV can tell you this, you find out how little you actually need. And in our world of excesses, it was quite liberating to figure out how little we needed.
Rhonda:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I bet.
Kimberly:
We had to figure out mail, first I eliminated junk mail, and then I had to figure out how to do everything online. Of course it's very simple these days. We all have our little smartphones that are a computer at our hands. This was 10 years ago, and smartphones were just in their early stages. In fact, I never had one until I came back in 2016. And we purposely turned off our cell phones when we left the country. We wanted to be disconnected. So we had to kind of figure that out, and then homeschooling my daughter.
Rhonda:
Mm-hmm. And I just wanted to ask about that. That feels like a lot because don't you have to follow a certain curriculum in order for her to stay up to date and be able to do her exams and all of that?
Kimberly:
It's a surprisingly unregulated area of the world. There's an awful lot of information, but very little that says, “this is what your fifth grader should know,” or, “this is what your sixth grader should know.” And much of that is because you can't build a consensus on that, certainly not in the United States. There's not an awful lot of agreement on what they should know.
Our state level had some English. What did they have? They had English and language arts and mathematics, and I believe those were the only standards at the state level. So, we were kind of left to our own devices.
Rhonda:
Wow, so how did you handle that? Like what do you do for, I don't even know how much science happens in fifth grade anymore, but like, what do you do? Do you like, you know, teach her how to fix an engine? (Laugh)
Kimberly:
Well, a lot of the people that we met out there, there's an enormous community out there cruising, which is something that I had not really understood. Just to give you an example, once we got down to Grenada, which is where most cruisers will stay for hurricane season. There's a little box, a hurricane box, and where you see storms have a pretty regular pattern. Sometimes they deviate, but it's a pretty regular pattern if you ever look at a hundred-year hurricane history.
And so the very southern end of Grenada, which is below 12 degrees of latitude, is where many boats will stay for hurricane season. There are a couple hundred boats there. We had a community of kids there. There were probably 30 of them in our anchorage and there were two or three anchorages, probably 30 kids between the ages of, you know, five and six and 18 that lived on boats.
Rhonda:
Fabulous, that must have been great.
Kimberly:
And now that's a very short period of the trip. It was only a three month period of the trip, but you meet up with those people as you go along.
I happened upon a book. I spent an entire chapter on the homeschooling or what we called “boat schooling.” I didn't even know what the word curriculum really meant. I was just looking for what was it that she was supposed to be learning, versus what materials were we going to use to learn it? And I just couldn't come up with that.
Well, there is actually a gentleman out there who's put together a series of books. It's called Core Curriculum. And it's basically the basics. There is a series of books. And so I picked up the one that was, what should your fourth grader know? And I read through it and I was like, “okay, is she learning that this year? Where is she this year in this?” And so I picked up the fifth grader, sixth grader and seventh grader, because I didn't know how quickly we'd go.
And then from there, math was the only one that we actually purchased a curriculum for. And my daughter was pretty advanced in math, so I knew I wanted to encourage that and that's a strong suit of mine. We did a bit more math than she might have done. Science, we really utilized what was around us. We ended up crossing over the humpback whales.
Rhonda:
I mean, it's the ultimate biology class, right? Wow.
Kimberly:
And then she had said when she found out we're going to homeschool, she's like, “can we build and explode volcanoes?” And I thought, “sure, why not?” So that's what we did with that group of 30 kids down in Grenada. We were at a Marina and the Marina had a restaurant and bar. And so here I had all the kids in the bar, paper macheing their volcanoes and the marina was fabulous. They let the kids, you know, we had a shelf and they let them dry, and then one day we had the entire anchorage out there and we exploded volcanoes. Nice chemistry experiment.
And we had visited Montserrat, which you know the Jimmy Buffett song, “I don't know where I'm gonna go when the volcano blows”? That's the La Soufrière volcano in Montserrat. He used to have his recording studio there. About 25 years ago, that volcano blew, and two thirds of the island is uninhabitable. It's called the exclusion zone. And we spent two days on Montserrat and we toured the exclusion zone and then we took our boat around the whole south side of the island that's uninhabitable and looked at all the ash.
It's like a modern-day Pompeii. You could see the very tippy top of a church steeple poking out from the ash, and that was all that was left of the entire southern part of it. So she'd learned about these volcanoes. We happened to go over an active volcano, an underwater volcano, as it had some activity. So we're, you know, learning all of these things on the road, and then they get to blow the volcanoes. We'd really tried to do it as very much of what was around us. And history, I mean, history was fabulous.
Rhonda:
Mm, wow, your kid is so lucky. Oh my goodness. So, when you started all this, did you think you were going to write a book about it? Kimberly, were you like, “oh, I must take copious notes because later on I'll want to write a memoir about this.”
Kimberly:
I had no idea I would write a book. However, I'm one of those, “let's take copious notes about everything I have.”
Rhonda:
Well, that's helpful.
Kimberly:
I have long journaled just about every day of my life, probably since, I don't know, I could write, first or second grade. I go back and I have journals and journals and diaries and diaries. One of the things that we did was send postcards home to ourselves. I had read this trick from some travel writer when we took our daughter, who was only three, and drove cross country. I'm like, “she's just not gonna remember.”
We went to 32 states and 17 national parks, and she's not gonna remember any of this, but I am. How do I help her remember it? And so I bought postcards everywhere and I sent them from where we were. Kind of the beauty of a postcard is, first it's short, but then it LAO takes you right back to the moment. It's like a journal entry, and it takes you right back to the moment. So I sent those postcards home and we signed them, “love, us.” Sometimes Ali wrote them, most of the time I wrote them, but oftentimes we're in places where there wasn't a little store to buy a postcard. And so we made them. We just had card stock and we cut it down to a postcard size and we made our postcards. So it's kind of an old fashioned scrapbook.
Rhonda:
Mm. I don't remember the last time I got a postcard, but it's a great idea. It's such a good idea.
Kimberly:
Well, I was kind of surprised. It's a fabulous idea and I can take no credit for it because I'm sure I copied it from someone, but it was brilliant. And we got home and I had over 300 postcards.
Rhonda:
Oh, wow. And are they all from different places you'd visited over the two year period?
Kimberly:
Absolutely, they take you on the journey to and from. And if anybody is interested in seeing some of these postcards, I've just started to include them on my website. I've just launched a blog as well as the book.
Rhonda:
Oh, so good. Okay. Kimberlyjwardwriter.com is where we go for that. I'm excited to see some of those.
So, let's talk a little bit about the process of the book. Going back, so, you had a lot of material. And then you get back and you decide you're going to write this book. What happened from there?
Kimberly:
Correct. Well, I happened to see in my little community newspaper that there was a memoir writing course at the library. And I thought, “okay, that's exactly what I need.” I signed up and I went to the first session. It was a five week course.
The first one was clearly an intro and what to expect. And then every week from there on, we had a prompt. We were to write from that prompt and expected to read our writings. Well, I had been writing for years and years and years. And other than papers that I turned in to professors, I had never let anyone read my writings.
Rhonda:
Oh wow. How did that feel?
Kimberly:
It felt like being on a stage, stark naked is how it felt.
Rhonda:
Mm. Not the most comfortable.
Kimberly:
However, after I got through the first one, it's great community. I was probably the youngest by far, by multiple decades, in the course. There was one other gal my age. But we had the most fascinating humans. This was back in 2016. And these were the folks who lived through the Great War. It was humbling, to me. It was a perfect opportunity to both be vulnerable and then watch others be very vulnerable. And it was a nice community. And I know you've long preached the writing community and it's beyond perfect.
Rhonda:
So important. And I love that you did that with your library.
Kimberly:
It was fabulous. I wonder if they still do it. If not, I may actually see if I can facilitate something like that, because it's really important.
I ended up writing four essays based on these prompts. And interestingly, those essays are the basis for basically my first two chapters.
Rhonda:
Oh, fun. That's awesome. Okay. So you did end up keeping some of that material.
Kimberly:
I kept much of that material.
Rhonda:
Okay. So you started the book in 2016.
Kimberly:
I did. I started the book in 2016 and that was so empowering and so encouraging that I could write these words, that these words were from my heart, and they were meaningful. Three of us, two others and I, decided to keep meeting and we met about every two or three weeks and we called ourselves the granola heads because that was our snack of choice. We had granola and coffee at our meetings and we'd each write something and share it.
And so this took us through November, which, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. And the premise of NaNoWriMo is that you write 50,000 words in 30 days. And I thought, “I don't know if I can do this, but let's stretch our wings.” I was shocked that when I got to the end of November, not only had I written 50,000 words, I had written 53,000 words, and I wasn't done. And I was surprised, and I thought, “okay, this has some basis for this.”
Some life took over. I had taken a job, reentry after not working for two years, left a little sparse savings. We wanted to get our financial situation back in a comfortable position. And so I wasn't doing much writing. Several months later, I started adding a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time.
2018, we had some major life changes. My mother, ended up moving in with us and we had, renovated the house and it was a major change. She moved across the country and moved in with us and so major change. I really struggled to find that girl who had been so eager and willing to move on a boat. So I really struggled with mindset and that's about where I was when I met you.
So, four years of caregiving for my mother who is still alive and doing great and living on her own now. Four years of high school with my daughter and a pandemic. And when I rolled out of all of that and moved to my mother into an assisted living, graduated my daughter, got her off to university. And be careful if you raise a traveler, she'll travel on you. She's in University in Scotland, at University of Glasgow, now.
Rhonda:
Good for her. So, I just wanted to say we are recording this while Kimberly is on her boat. You're hearing a little bit of the boat moving where they're anchored. And, and from time to time, there's a little bit of a lag between us, but that's okay. We're doing it. She's on her boat. She's making it work. So, then you and I met, was it in February of this year? Was it only February, or was it last August?
Kimberly:
Nope, it was February. It was the end of February.
Rhonda:
Wow. And so you came in and you—
Kimberly:
I finished my book and I published my book this year.
Rhonda:
Wow, you did a lot of work this year.
Kimberly:
Yes. I have a lot to be grateful for, you.
Rhonda:
Oh, that's sweet of you, Kimberly, but look, you did all the work.
Kimberly:
I had to change my mindset and I really needed a coach to get me there and you were absolutely there. I started to look at my book as a project. How much was done, what needed to be done, I had the resources.
Also a number of the folks that I met in the writing community through your boot camp. I was reminded of the Pomodoro method. And I spent 30 minute chunks. And so I really finished this. I had to figure out where I was. It was kind of a mess at that point, but I had never finished my rough draft.
Rhonda:
Kimberly, tell me about the publishing. Tell me a little bit about the publishing process. So, you self-published this. It's a really gorgeous book, like the cover is a nautical map, I think, and then photo on top. But even like the quality is really good. Like, you know, you see quite a number of books that are kind of so-so, you know, when people go indie publishing, sometimes the quality isn't there, but this is really great quality. Tell me about the process, how you figured out the cover, and how you managed to get this all on your own, never having done it before.
Kimberly:
One of your affirmations was, “I am growing as a writer.” And I have used that as in my morning affirmations. I'm a Hal Elrod devotee. He has written the Miracle Morning. And I start my day with silence and meditation, affirmations, visualizations. And one of the things I said is I'm growing as a writer. There's an awful lot I don't know, but there's an awful lot I do know.
I am an avid reader. So, I knew what I wanted the book to feel like and look like in my hands. Weight wise, size wise, heft wise, it's kind of like you have a book that you like. I knew what I liked and I've read an awful lot of—you helped me with my identity crisis.
It's a travel memoir. And I had no idea I had an identity crisis. I didn't know if I was a how-to, I didn't know what I was. Travel memoir is what you helped me determine that I was. And so I've read hundreds of them, thousands of them, maybe. I've read a lot of biographies. And so I knew what I wanted it to feel like. And I stayed true to that.
So I hired an editor, a professional editor who I learned about through Joanna Penn. I just started taking the master classes that were offered. If you're on Facebook, they pop up all the time. In fact, that's where I found you.
And I thought, for this Book Finishers Bootcamp, “what do I have to lose? I have everything to gain and nothing to lose.” I started listening to it and just started learning more and more about it. I knew I needed an editor and I knew that was the first step once I finished my rough draft and had gone through my own self-editing. I wanted a professional editor because I did not want it, you know, I wanted it to be as good as it could be.
Rhonda:
Good for you.
Kimberly: So I found this gentleman and I went out and I read about him and honestly I fell in love with him because he said he was equal parts coach, editor, and psychologist. And I thought, “that's perfectly exactly what I need.” And it's really what they are.
He happened to be taking his work through Reedsy. And I had never heard of Reedsy. So I went out and explored Reedsy and as a self publisher, Reedsy is fantastic. There's so many resources out there, an awful lot of free resources out there, for writers who are looking at going the indie route. And so I hired Howard.
I hired him to do all of the edits, starting with developmental all the way through proof. And I knew I wanted one person. I wanted someone who had done this memoir-biography space before. And I wanted somebody who was a non-sailor, as well, because I didn't want any of this to be, you know, terminology that people didn't understand. So I hired Howard Lovey.
His last name says it all. I absolutely loved him. He was gentle with me. He helped me to see, he cut out large swaths of things. He's like, “nah, this is not the story.” There were a lot of things. I just had to open myself up and surrender to his knowledge. And I did, and I'm very happy with the product.
And that's a hard part. I know an awful lot of people who are afraid of the editing process. Open yourself up. That person is not there to rip your work apart. They're there to help make it the best you can do.
Rhonda:
Yeah, they're a partner, aren't they? They're a partner in the book.
Kimberly:
Oh, absolutely. Other than my crew of three, he was the most important part of that book. I will absolutely use him again. I loved him and I will continue to follow his work. He is now getting ready to release his first book. It's kind of exciting. I also knew I didn't have the graphic skills to do the book cover. I didn't know those. I did not know formatting the book.
And as an independent author, I could not ignore Amazon. So I really wanted Amazon skills. So, I started looking at self-publishing coaching services where that was a big part of what they did. I came across selfpublishing.com, and I wanted to make a decision quickly because I needed to have the skin in the game, which for me meant the money in the game, to finish this and keep going and publish it.
I hired selfpublishing.com and they provide an awful lot of education. They also have coaches and they publish. They absolutely publish books. So I hired them as well. For me, those were the skills I needed to know. They had the graphic designer portion of it. Now, I had the vision for my cover. If you look at the chart, if you look right above the “E” on crew of three, that's Mattapoiset. That's my hometown. So that is a chart of my home waters.
Rhonda:
Oh wow. Okay, I love that.
Kimberly:
And I just, again, learned from them and kept learning and kept learning. And the perfect part about it is that now I know those things. I know how to format. I know, just using Canva, that I can create a cover. If I have a good vision, that's a sellable vision. Does it mean I may not hire graphic designers again? I probably will. But I can also just hire for fewer of the pieces next time. Cassiopeia next time. I loved it. I am loving the process of publishing.
Rhonda:
Okay, so tell me about next time. Do you already have another book in mind, Kimberly?
Kimberly:
I have two in mind at the moment. The second one is something to do with the postcards, which we signed “love, us.” So I've already in my head, I have a working title of Love, Us. Any of the complaints I've heard about my book is, “we wanted more sailing,” because this was really the planning process. The first book, The Crew of Three, was the planning process. So people wanted more of the journey.
Like, “where did you go?” Of course, people want to hear about all the dramatic things. Were there pirates? Were you in hurricanes? No and no. We had some bad weather, but we just stayed put. We're pleasure cruisers. But people want to know, “where did you go?” And then, “how did your family live in a 34 foot boat for two years?” And I get that. Those are the stories that I think are next.
Oh, I also think there is a reentry book, coming back to normal life. I don't even know what normal is, but coming back to normal life after living on a sailboat, we came back to our house and our town and our school system and our friends and our family, but we were wholly changed people. So there is absolutely a reentry component to it. And the working title for that one is Shuckable, based on our oyster farming experience and how we came back. And awful lot of people would love to know how Ali came back and made it through junior high and high school and then on to college, but that's her story, not mine to tell.
Rhonda:
I think that's important. That's really important for memoir, knowing which piece of a story is your story to tell, you know, and staying focused on that. So there's so there's more books in the works. I love this. You've really just taken on this identity of a working writer. You're a working writer now. This is what you do. You sail the world and you and you write.
Kimberly:
Well, and that's the other thing is that my husband and I figured out with the oystering and the writing. This is our first year of implementing it. So we'll see, you know, when I plan God laughs. However, our current plan is to take the boat to the Bahamas, January, February, March, and come back to Massachusetts, work the oysters April through December, and repeat as long as it amuses us.
Rhonda:
Love it. Well, thanks so much for this, Kimberly. I'm really excited to hear where things went and how you approached everything to get this book out in the world. So it's called Crew of Three: How Bold Dreams and Detailed Plans Launched Our Family Sailing Adventure. And you can find more about Kimberly at kimberlyjwardwriter.com. Thanks so much for this conversation, Kimberly. I'm looking forward to seeing what you write next.
Kimberly
My pleasure. Thanks so much, Rhonda.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
