We are long overdue for an update on our book. First, we want to thank everyone that has supported us along this incredible journey and for your patience as it has taken longer than expected.

These last few months - we thought we’d be in the home stretch of completing our book - have proven to be more challenging as life usually tends to do. We did complete chapter 5 the night before Amy’s surgery. She started out feeling much better and now has the new challenge of dealing with the drastic effects of surgical menopause. We also had to say good bye to our sweet 15 year old cat, Juno, two weeks after her surgery.

We had made our money stretch as far as possible and even took on new debt to try to stay focused but that proved to be unsuccessful as well. While Amy looked for an online remote job, we had also been doing client work that seemed to interfere with Joe’s creativity for our book. His energy was consumed by that client project. 

The biggest challenge we think new authors face is finding the balance in maintaining daily life with committing time to your passion project, your book. Now that Amy has worked a few weeks with a wonderful, very flexible remote job she enjoys and earns enough to pay our monthly expenses as well as coming to completion on the client work, we feel we are finding our balance again even through the difficult days. Joe is back working on the book and almost ready to pass new pages on to Amy to finish up. We have found renewed energy with our nomad community and enjoying the time back in our van, almost back on the road. We will be heading north out of Florida in May, hopefully after Amy gets cleared from all her doctors. So for now, we take short trips around Florida to be in our home and then coming back to the Tampa area for Joe’s karate classes. He started these classes to help him manage the stress of all that’s been going on. Whatever happens we keep on rolling and finishing this book.

Enjoy this 8 minute video capturing one of our discussions throughout this process. An author’s journey is not an easy path. Add in the creativity of illustration and it’s a whole new beast. If it was easy, everyone would do it. We still feel this will totally be worth it.