As often happens, I get so busy with other things that I forget I have a website. I made a date with myself some time ago to get back to blogging, and I kept moving the date forward on my calendar as life intervened, but today is the day that I can finally surface.
It’s been a whirlwind since the start of the year. Over the holidays I was on a long cruise assignment on Silver Muse that didn’t end until early February. When I got home, I had my first true vacation in years, lounging in Mexico. I hear some of you saying that I have a lot of nerve talking about no vacation time, since I spend about half the year on cruise ships, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that yes, cruises are vacations for guests, and I do have a lot of free time to go ashore in wonderful places, and I get to enjoy all the activities and amenities onboard luxury ships, but it’s work for me.
I always spend months before an assignment putting together 45-minute lectures that focus for around 15 minutes on what there is to do and see in port, and the rest of the time delve into the history, culture, important people, and other significant things about each stop. A typical assignment takes months of prep time. I am fully prepared when I step onboard, but I am laser-focused on delivering as close to a perfect talk as I can. This means that I review each talk multiple times, adding and deleting material, looking for better images if I am not happy with what I have, and spending a little time working with the production crew to make sure everything goes smoothly with the slides and the audio. Honestly, I rarely feel completely at rest since there is always some preparation I want to do.
The other part of being a cruise lecturer is my public visibility onboard. The minute I step out of my room, I become a performer of a role. Everything, from getting a cup of coffee, to going to the gym, to sitting in another lecture, to playing a game, or having a meal is an opportunity for others to observe me. I don’t mind this at all, because I like the role, but it does mean that in this sense, I am always at work.
So now, as I go through the year 2026, I have gotten to March. I was home in Victoria for all of March and into April, but my new novel Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel was coming out in May, and I had what felt like a thousand things to do in preparation for all the promotion that goes with a new book.
If I had known when I published my first novel, The Four Seasons, that having an in-house publicist meant I would have roughly one month of part-time effort from a junior publicist with a huge workload of other clients, I would have realized that it was almost entirely up to me to promote my book. I would have hired a publicist, and that might have resulted in much more exposure, and perhaps a different trajectory for my career. I would have done everything I could think of on my own to beat the bushes to bring attention to my book.
I decided that, though it was too late to change that, there was nothing stopping me from doing for Aloha what I should have done back then. As a result, I hired a publicist who is doing a good job getting me media attention, speaking engagements, and other promotional opportunities. On my own, I have been reaching out to every library and independent bookstore on Vancouver Island, and contacting every organization I can think of who has events involving speakers. I’ve been going around to bookstores talking with owners and managers. I initiated a fundraiser where I will speak and donate the proceeds. What this means is that on any given day I will have my own plans for my time, but almost always have to fit in something that the publicist wants, or someone will get in touch with me about an event or other opportunity based on my own outreach.
And that brings me to mid-April, when I had another cruise assignment from Tokyo to Seattle. By the time I got home it was May, pub month, where my big activity was to plan and carry out a really fun launch party.
In early June I went on a promotional trip to San Diego. I just got back a few days ago, and am in the thick of promotion again.
But back to the cruising part of my life. I am off on a long assignment, from the end of August to the beginning of November, and there’s all that prep to do before I get on board and now only about two months to do it. Add that to my general busy-ness and I think you can see why it’s so easy to forget I have a website. Still, I have so much to tell you, that I don’t think I will forget it for long!