Category: events

Goat, Boat, Encore

October 3, 2024

The Goat and the Boat

The goat has gone back to its original owner. As was evident to our neighbor and all the neighbors, the fencing around his property was inadequate. I admired his independent streak and was charmed by his fixation on our front door. Goodbye, goat! I hope you will find a more suitable new home. Anybody want a goat?

Our friend Jim decided his health wasn’t up to heading across the Pacific in a sailboat one more time. He was right, and shortly afterward ended up hospitalized in intensive care.

If you’d like to support Jim, look for three books: Windswept by his late wife Ginny Sollars, A Bachelor’s Paradise, and the Yamamoto Affair. The first is an account of the family’s years sailing the Pacific; the second is about Jim’s adventures in the Pacific as a bachelor; and the third is a gripping novel of suspense and intrigue inspired by his own diving experiences and the historical World War II Japanese admiral, Yamamoto.

As far as we know, the boat is still in San Carlos and for sale.  Anybody want a boat?

The Book

I keep adjusting the ads on Amazon, and the book continues to sell an average of 20 books a month, not (yet) more than the cost of the ads. We’d like more readers to discover the book. It’s gotten more ratings on Good Reads and Amazon, but we haven’t had a new review in several months. Hint, hint! You don’t have to be a great writer; just share your honest reaction. Even star ratings help, but a few words are much more meaningful to us and readers trying to decide whether to read or buy the book.

The three copies at the Albuquerque Public Library continue to circulate.

Events

If you’re within hailing distance of Albuquerque, Kent will read at Books on the Bosque this coming Saturday, October 5. We hope to see some of you there. Books on the Bosque is a lovely, relatively new independent bookstore with many activities worth checking out.

Kent will also speak at the Tony Hillerman Branch of the Albuquerque Public Library on Saturday, October 26, at 1 pm., a shorter version of his illustrated January presentation at Oasis.

Book Awards

We Ran Away to Sea is a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award finalist. Winners will be announced sometime in October.  We’ve also submitted the book for a few other awards

The most unusual is The Wishing Shelf. Based in England, the award is chosen by reading groups in London and Stockholm, Sweden. Unlike most awards, where you send in your application fee and wait for award announcements, this one asks for a book description before allowing you to submit a book for consideration.  The invitation from the award administrator felt like a mini award.

He wrote: “Thanks very much for contacting us. I had a look at your book on Amazon, and I thought it looked very interesting. I very much liked the look of the cover and the blurb, and the Look Inside seems to flow well. I see you also have a number of reviews, which I read with interest. So, yes, please send me a PDF of the book plus a JPEG or PDF of the covers.”

Other Stuff

Since I didn’t get a newsletter out in August, I’m doing a lot of catching up here.

  • Kent and I are editing stories we left out of We Ran Away to Sea, but work is going slowly because …
  • I’m finally working on my book, working title “Once a Pilgrim,” about the first half and maybe the second half of my first Camino.

Picture of Vézelay Courtesy of luctheo on Pixabay

  • We’re planning travels after being home all summer: next week to San Francisco to see family, and on October 28 to France, where we intend to walk the less traveled Voie de Vézelay, which begins at the Basilica of Mary Magdalene in Vézelay and eventually meets the Camino Frances in St. Jean Pied-de-Port at the Spanish border. We won’t manage more than one-third of the 900 kilometers in just over three weeks of walking. Weather will be unpredictable but probably not hot, and many pilgrim lodgings will have closed for the season. I’ll try to post on my blog, Caminobleu.com, or at least on Facebook because writing blogs on a cell phone after a day of walking is not easy. And there may be days with no internet.

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June’s Bustin’ Out All Over

Who wants to sail or paddle down the Rio Grande?

In April, we quoted Pam writing about the dinghy under the bed, when she was dreaming of taking off to sea again and leaving the South Dakota winter behind.

At the end of April, we finally got the old dinghy out on the Rio Grande.  Getting it from the back of the car and carrying it to the water and out again was the hard part. Our trip was rather short at about 45 minutes from launch to take-out, but we did it!  Paddling down the Rio Grande, we’d never know we were in the midst of a city of over 500,000.  It was a little taste of life on the water. Then we went to San Francisco where waves rolled in from the Pacific.  I made a short video, hoping whet (wet?) your interest.

See our latest video: The Endless Lure of the Sea

A lovely response to We Ran Away to Sea

We’ve recently had some lovely responses to We Ran Away to Sea. Geoff Boerne, the captain of Lo Entropy, a boat Kent and Pam encountered in Mexico in the 1990s, last week finally received the copy of the book we’d sent him at the end of February. Apparently it takes a long time to get a book to Denmark! He tells us he started reading on Friday evening and finished the book on Saturday afternoon, sad to have it come to an end. He also saw the book as not just a sailing book, but a love story, which I, too, think it is.  He had much more to say, and, of course, identified with all the sailing bits.  Thank you, Geoff!

There is more about Geoff and his current endeavors in today’s blog post. Check out what he and Peter Roberts are doing to help save our planet, by clicking the following link on my Caminobleu blog:

Can We Save Our Planet?

June-July Events – Mark Your Calendars!

Kent will be giving a book talk: Saturday, June 29 from 1-2 p.m at the Juan Tabo branch of the Albuquerque Public Library.

He will also be selling and signing books with a few other authors on Saturday, July 6 at the lovely Garcia Street Books, Santa Fe, from 10-12 am. We hope to see some of our Santa Fe friends!

Three copies of the book are now available at the Albuquerque Public Library, and there is a waiting list! The call number is 813.54 KEDL. Please request more copies!

We Still Need More Reviews

Check out the new reviews on Amazon and on our webpage:  Follow Kent’s author page by clicking on follow on Amazon.  We need more reviews!  Good Reads is another place to put reviews. Can you help us get up to 50? We’re almost there! See the help on posting reviews a bit farther down the page.

There was a sudden spike in book sales in early June for three days in a row. That was a welcome mystery, and we hope it keeps up.

I also added some new content to the book page on Amazon. But, oops! Only part of the content appears on the paperback page. It’s all there on the Kindle page, so look there for now, and I’ll try to fix it tomorrow.

Send us a picture of you reading the book

Please send us your picture of you or someone reading the book or seeing the book in interesting places.

Esther Jantzen, author of Walk: Jamie Bacon’s Secret MIssion on the Camino de Santiago, and founder of Elder Activist Readers, enjoying We Ran Away to Sea.

Return from Indonesia

We took a break from book stuff for three weeks in May and enjoyed a fascinating impromptu trip to Indonesia. We were so captivated by our experiences that we totally forgot to take pictures with the book in the many intriguing and scenic places we visited. Alas! But here we are, without the book!

Linnea and Kent riding high in the sky in Bali, Indonesia