My Blog is in a Book!

I’m in a book! Or more specifically, this blog is in a book!

Last year I got a message from Paul Thornton, author of previous books on cruising The Joy of Cruising, and Cruising Interrupted. He was wondering if I would be interested in being interviewed for his next book, The Joy of Cruising Again. He had found my blog, Life of Iris, through Twitter (follow Life of Iris on Twitter) and thought it could be a good fit. I had a few questions, but of course I said yes!

All views (on this blog and in the book) are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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Paul’s books on cruising feature stories from all types of cruisers – avid cruisers, cruise bloggers, vloggers, crew members pas, entertainers, traveling spouses and more (although I find it fun that I am in at least a few of those categories).

Having been familiar with his books – and excited to join the company of so many incredible and esteemed voices in the cruise industry I was excited to participate in this next book and see what the process entailed.

The process for this, from my side anyways, was that I received a questionnaire asking all about my cruising experience, what prompted me to start my blog, and what I enjoy for travel. This was a pretty thorough questionnaire and had me digging out old cruising journals from when I was a kid to try to figure out how many cruises I had actually been on – as a passenger, a rough guess as a crew member, and a rough guess as wife-on-board. Let’s just say the numbers are pretty wild to think of how much of my life I’ve spent floating around the world.

After this questionnaire and some emailing we had a video call. The video call was what had prompted my biggest question – I wanted to be able to chat with Paul completely honestly but I needed to know how much of our conversation would be “on the record”.

If you’ve ever worked in a customer service role you know that most everything that you say publicly needs to go through a filter of some sort. It’s different to chat with a friend versus sharing a story with the world and I wanted to both be honest with him about my life and experiences while also being able to have the chance to make sure what was published was what I was comfortable sharing with the world. He created such a great environment to help bring a story out of me while also letting me edit and adjust things that I wasn’t sure I wanted out there.

For those of you that followed along with my life last year you know that it was not a normal year and it was throughout last year that this book and my chapter in this book was being created. The first time Paul and I chatted I was about to head back to sea to train for a new job. Then the ship I was scheduled to transfer to and to bring back into service was then chartered to be used to house Ukrainian families for six months. That was not exactly your typical return to service – and then after all of that I went back to that ship to bring it back into revenue sailing service. Luckily, as my “joy of cruising again” plans changed over the course of last year Paul would make edits as we went.

I’m really happy with how my chapter turned out. It certainly spans the course of my cruise experience and goes a fair bit into my time onboard at the beginning of the pandemic and my time sailing with my husband.

Next up? I am excited to say I’ve been invited to be featured on Paul’s The Joy of Cruising podcast. I’ll let you know once this is on the air.

Want to check it the book? It’s available for digital download or to order a paper copy on Amazon as The Joy of Cruising Again by Paul Thornton.