EPISODE 20
February 9, 2022
Sally Cronin was born in the UK in the early ’50s, but from the tender age of 18 months, she began what has been a lifelong nomadic existence living in eight countries, including Sri Lanka, Malta, South Africa, the US, Belgium and Spain before settling in 2016 with her husband on the Southern coast of Ireland. Her work and her desire to see some of the most beautiful parts of the world has taken her to many more destinations around Europe and Canada and south to New Zealand. All those experiences, including her weight loss journey, and the people she met along the way, provided a rich source of inspiration for her, ultimately informing her creative work of the last 20 years as a writer and author of 15 books: SmorgasboardBlogMagazine.com
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:48] Louise: Hello Listeners. Welcome to Episode 20 of Women Who Walk. This is the first episode of 2022 and Season 2 and today my first guest of the year is Sally Cronin.
[00:01:03] Louise: Sally was born in the early ’50s, in South Hampshire, in the UK. But from the tender age of 18 months, she began what has been a lifelong nomadic existence living in eight countries, including Sri Lanka, Malta, South Africa, the US and Spain before settling in 2016 with her husband on the Southern coast of Ireland.
[00:01:29] Louise: Her work and her desire to see some of the most beautiful parts of the world has taken her to many more destinations around Europe and Canada and south to New Zealand. All those experiences, and the people she met along the way, provided a rich source of inspiration for her, ultimately informing her creative work of the last 20 years as a writer.
[00:01:54] Louise: After a career in customer facing roles in the hospitality, retail, advertising, and telecommunications industry, she wrote and published her first book in 1999 called, Size Matters, about her weight loss journey, losing 150 pounds in 18 months.
[00:02:16] Louise: This was followed by 14 further fiction and nonfiction books, including a number of short story collections. Her first book release resulted in a radio interview in Spain that led to four years as a nutritional consultant for an English language station. And this was followed by four years with her own health show and Sunday morning show on local radio in the UK. And then as a station director, newsreader and presenter for an online television station.
[00:02:51] Louise: Her latest release, Life is Like a Mosaic: Random Fragments in Harmony is a collection of 50-plus images and poems on life, nature, love, delivered with a touch of humor. Via social media and her blog, Smorgasbord Blog Magazine, Sally offers other writers support marketing and promoting their books. And on her podcast, SoundCloud Sally Cronin, she shares book reviews and short stories.
[00:03:25] Louise: Sally’s husband, David Cronin, is the publisher of my two recent nonfiction titles: Women Who Walk: How 20 Women from 16 Countries Came to Live in Portugal, the inspiration for this podcast, and it’s sequel, The Winding Road to Portugal: 20 Men From 11 Countries Share Their Stories. David mentioned Sally’s travels, writing, and blog to me on a number of occasions, but it wasn’t until December last year that I finally reached out to Sally. And so this interview is the first live conversation we’ve had.
[00:04:00] Louise: One small disclaimer. We had some technical issues. So we ended up using our phones for this interview. You’ll notice as a result that Sally’s voice sounds a bit distant, however, it went well. And so I do hope you enjoy my conversation with Sally Cronin.
[00:04:19]
[00:04:30] Louise: Welcome Sally, thank you for being a guest on Women Who Walk today. And now you’re currently living in the, or on the Southeast coast of Ireland. Can you paint a picture for us? Maybe set the scene, give listeners a sense of your surrounds and the landscape, the view from your window.
[00:04:49] Sally: I certainly can. And thank you very much for the invitation to chat about my adventures and sometimes misadventures along the journey to arriving back here in Ireland. We’re very lucky. We live on the east coast of Ireland, which doesn’t tend to get the rough weather that the west coast does. It’s mainly sandy beaches, fishing villages and the larger ports such as Wexford and Waterford with their long history of the Vikings, et cetera. We live in a holiday resort called Courtown.
[00:05:17] Sally: Yeah, it was a holiday resort back in the ’30s and ’40s. In fact, my father-in-law who had a big band would come here for the summer season and stay at the hotel, which had a ballroom. So in the ’30s and ’40s, he was actually playing music here.
[00:05:34] Louise: Oh, how wonderful.
[00:05:35] Sally: They played jazz. Uh, and it has a long history as a place for people from Dublin would come down. Um, there are holiday homes and trailer parks and things in the area.
[00:05:46] Louise: Right, right. Okay. Well, thank you for setting the scene it sounds rather lovely. Now, you were born in the UK in the early ’50s, and when you were barely two-years-old, your family moved to Ceylon now, Sri Lanka. And then six years later, the family was living in Malta. And then in the early ’60s, your father, who was in the Royal Navy, I believe, was posted to Cape Town in South Africa where you lived for a few years.
[00:06:14] Louise: So what was it like for you to have these very diverse country and cultural experiences during your formative years? And do you think these experiences shaped the decisions you made as a young adult and continue to shape your life’s direction?
[00:06:30] Sally: I believe it was one big adventure, as far as I can remember. I was very lucky to have two older sisters, 10 and 11 years older than I was, who allowed me to tag along wherever they went, which meant I learned to swim at 18 months. Read by the time I went to school at 4 and I was immaculately dressed as my eldest sister was an accomplished dressmaker who loved to make smocked dresses. As I grew older, I began to appreciate the more cultural aspects of the various countries and that they will more than sunshine and swimming.
[00:07:01] Sally: This is particularly true of South Africa. Even though I was only 10, it was made very clear, that I couldn’t question the then segregation of apartheid. Despite being guests in the country, my parents were still subject to law, despite their own personal views. And I went to a national school, um, and learned to speak Afrikaans and learned to hold my tongue. It was very hard for me not to speak my mind. We had a lovely maid called Linda Mooi and my mother, I know, paid her more than the legal limit and sent her home each week for her day off with supplies. She also permitted her husband to come and spend the occasional night in her quarters, which was not allowed either.
[00:07:38] Sally: There was some stretching of the rules. And she taught me Xhosa lullabies, and reinforced them as a ten-year-old that human kindness and love has nothing to do with the color of our skin. So I think from that perspective culturally, I learnt that, uh, we are all human under whatever color skin we are.
[00:07:59] Louise: Hmm, oh what a profound experience as a young child. And then, you did take that with you into your later years with a greater understanding of human nature.
[00:08:10] Sally: Yes, I’m sure that all the changing culture and the people around me and learning new languages made me more adaptable as a teenager and an adult. I was always comfortable with meeting new people, different life experiences. It certainly gave me self-confidence that stood me in good stead in both work environment and personal relationships. And it also gave me inspiration for my stories of course, and certainly provided me with more than a few character concepts.
[00:08:34] Louise: Yes, I bet. I bet many of your stories have composite characters in them from your early years?
[00:08:40] Sally: Yes. And with the different environments too, it means that I can hop from one place to another, so many of my short stories, you might find one in Sri Lanka, one in Malta, one in France, one in Spain. So yes, from that perspective, it’s, it’s, it’s been great.
[00:08:58] Louise: That’s terrific that you’re able to draw on all those country experiences in your stories.
[00:09:04] Sally: I don’t like waste. I don’t like wasting anything, which is why I shall never retire officially. Um, I think it’s such an awful waste of people’s life and experiences to, to not at least utilize it in some form or fashion, if you can pass them along, then perhaps somebody else might benefit from, or at least enjoy them.
[00:09:23] Louise: Yeah. Actually that was going to be one of my questions at the end about, not retiring, I guess, because you aren’t, but we’ll get them. Um, as a teen, you had a summer job cooking in a cafe and at the time, I understand your aspiration was to go to drama school, but that was sidelined by your parents’ concern that you should do something practical. Can you talk us through this period in your life and how it resulted in your running your own very successful catering business on the Isle of Wight?
[00:09:52] Sally: It was sort of convoluted because at that time, of course, in the ’60s, I had a younger brother and he was destined to go to university. In those days, of course you needed money to go to university. And my parents were very honest with me and said, well, look, that is earmarked for him. And your two sisters have had great careers as secretaries. And whilst you like singing and you like dancing to be honest, it’s a very precarious career and it’s always a good thing to have something to fall back on. And they were absolutely right, but I was brought up watching the Hollywood musicals that my mother loved and the westerns that were my father’s favorite entertainment.
[00:10:29] Sally: And I also suspect that part of the process of getting accepted in all the different schools and cultures, as a child and young teen, encouraged an ability to adopt different personas. For example, after about a week, I developed a very strong South African accent at school and would then go home and speak English in front of my parents.
[00:10:49] Sally: And if you sound the same as everyone else, you blend in. And this was also the case of course, when we returned to the UK and ended up in the middle of the Lancashire countryside. Within a week, I had an accent, which was up north and so to be honest with you, I think part of the change of the different people, environments, it encouraged this sort of acting ability.
[00:11:09] Louise: It sounds like you’re a really good mimic.
[00:11:11] Sally: I do, I do enjoy it. But anyway, to get back to this convoluted story, I was disappointed at 16, obviously not to follow my dream, but I understood their concern. It was unpredictable, but I have to say that having that secretarial training to fall back on, despite me following different career trends, was absolutely a blessing in disguise. Wherever I was, I’d always sign up for secretarial jobs. Um, and I was therefore always able to earn money. After the south sea, um, where I sold souvenirs and then moved into the kitchen, I learned more than a few useful catering skills, over the three years.
[00:11:48] Sally: Um, I married at 20 and we moved around quite a bit, because he was in the Royal Airforce. But by 24, he decided not to extend his commission. And we ended up doing a management catering course for a national steak house, which were all the rage in the ’70s. Um, and after that we were assistant managers for a while. And then we were offered a public house on the Isle of Wight. I ran the catering side of the pub as my own business. During the summer months, I was preparing a hundred-plus lunches a day and about 50 suppers at night on my own.
[00:12:22] Sally: So it just goes to show that most experiences come in handy throughout your life.
[00:12:26] Louise: Indeed, indeed. Now this marriage breaks down and then you move to Wales, with the offer of an assistant management position at a Gothic Luxury Hotel, where you meet your second husband, David, but do tell us what exactly is a Gothic Luxury Hotel.
[00:12:44] Sally: It was a turreted-castle themed building with ornate brick work, including arches, which used the local granite. So very gray and imposing, and the inside had very high ceilings and more arches and was designed in the mid 1850s, when it was all the rage for rich landowners or in this case, this mine-owner built this place. It was very well-established with regular guests. Um, had an excellent rating. Part of my responsibility was for the dining room, as assistant manager.
[00:13:13] Sally: We had very good reputation for food and were fully booked every weekend with non-residents. And in the summer we set up the long terrace overlooking the estuary and the mountain. And we had quite a few television and radio personalities stay with us. It was a very adventurous couple of years, indeed.
[00:13:28] Louise: It sounds like it, but, but continuing on with your adventure, you and David then have some in-country moves. And at one point you were living in Hertfordshire, working for a magazine featuring Friesian dairy cattle, going to agricultural fairs, selling advertising. And on an occasion brokering bull semen. And now there’s gotta be a story here.
[00:13:50] Sally: There is, including my father who wondered who collected it. And whether I had to be involved in the process. Um, I was able to tell him, no. It goes back to the adaptability that I think I developed during my teens and childhood. Uh, at this time, David was on the fast track and his career was taking off. I was very happy to move to, as it meant new adventures. I’d find a job in the area and was happy to try anything new. Even if it was signing up and doing some temp jobs for a while. I saw the advertisement for, uh, an advertising and editorial assistant and jumped at the chance. And this led to some very interesting interactions around the Southwest of England where I would have my stand in one of the dairy cow’s tents between bovine prima donnas so they’d be four or five cows in each of the show herd and I’d have a table between them. And, uh, I would watch them having their udders talcum powdered.
[00:14:48] Louise: Good god!
[00:14:48] Sally: Backends kept pristine before they headed into the ring. The odor was oddly comforting.
[00:14:54] Louise: Why is that? Was it the talcum powder?
[00:14:56] Sally: No the odor of, yeah.
[00:14:59] Louise: I was just going to say, I feel like I’m listening to an episode of All Creatures, Great and Small.
[00:15:04] Sally: Yes it was a bit. Yes. Except I didn’t have to put my arm anywhere unfortunate.
[00:15:11] Louise: That’s lucky.
[00:15:11] Sally: It was, it was.
[00:15:13] Louise: So you mentioned that David’s career was really taking off and then it took you to Houston, where you lived for two years. And I understand that not long after that you returned to the UK from the US, you began having health issues due to your weight. Can you talk about this period and then how your health journey resulted in your first book Size Matters.
[00:15:37] Sally: Well, we had an amazing time in Texas, traveled all around America as David would fly to most of the major capitals on a regular basis. And I joined him at the weekends, flying out on the cheap seats late at night. We knew we’d only be there for a couple of years and wanted to make the most of the time.
[00:15:52] Sally: I have to say, we did eat very well; basic portion size was definitely more than we were used to. However, we were both very active and I swam most days nearly all year round, played tennis, but when we returned to the UK, it was an unsettled time. The job David came home to and his company was not as promised. Very shortly after that, his previous boss asked him to join his new startup in the London Docklands. I eventually joined the same company as a consultant to develop the custom services department and I ended up as director of customer services in London and then director of operations in East Anglia. It was a great job. I loved it, but it was long hours, uh, quite a bit of stress, uh, with a good dash of internal politics, which didn’t necessarily make the job any easier. I’m a stress eater.
[00:16:37] Sally: And without the safety valve of time off and exercise, the weight piled on. And by the age of 42, I weighed 330 pounds. Along with most of the related health issues. And finally, a doctor told me that getting to 45 would be unlikely. So finally, in 1996, David was offered a job in Brussels and we were slated to move there for a couple of years. And during that time I decided to study medicine and nutrition and sort out my weight and health. I’m not a stupid person, but could I prevent myself from eating a couple of Mars Bars a day? Nah.
Sally at 330 pounds, before her weight loss
[00:17:16] Sally: So I knew I had to do something very instructive. I had to find out why I’d got to where I got in this weight and health issues and resolve it. So I designed my own eating plan and I lost 150 pounds in 18 months, keeping a journal of my discoveries about why I piled the weight on, from a physical, mental, and emotional perspective.
[00:17:41] Sally: It was very illuminating when I went back over my life. We’ve talked about how, uh, traveling and change, developed me as a young child and as a teenager and how it gave me self-confidence, but all that change also caused uncertainty. And I think one of my strategies for coping with that is to eat.
[00:18:02] Sally: Anyway, I’d lost my weight, I, I read my journal and I decided that perhaps it might help people. So I published it initially in 2001. I did very well in Ireland and UK with quite a bit of publicity nationally. And then I republished it as an e-book, when we had our own publishing company in 2004 and in print. So that’s how the first book came about.
Sally after her weight loss of 150 pounds
[00:18:29] Louise: I just have a side question. One of the issues that people have when they lose weight is keeping the weight off. Were you able to crack that problem?
[00:18:41] Sally: Uh, to a larger extent, but there have been some stressful interludes along the way. Particularly looking after my mother for six years, towards the end when she had dementia and I worked hard to keep the weight off and I never ever put it back on again. So I think I got the strategy down, but I do have to keep an eye on it.
[00:19:03] Sally: One of the issues when you put on that much weight, is that not only do your fat cells fill up with fat, but you increase the number of fat cells you have. So when you lose a lot of weight, uh, you’re invariably left with all these fat cells going well, uh, when do we get the next fill? And it does seem like our bodies have a natural weigh point where they consider they should be and mine seems to be around 15 stone (210 pounds). So I have to watch out very, very carefully. If I start to put weight on is to watch what I’m doing. So yes, it’s, it’s not always easy to, to keep it off. Unfortunately, that is the case with many of the clients that I’ve worked with over the last 24 years.
[00:19:48] Louise: Yes. So that takes me to the next question then that, um, your book and your expertise led to you presenting health segments on an English-speaking radio station in Spain. How did that opportunity come about?
[00:20:04] Sally: We’d returned to Ireland from Brussels and I’d opened my own dietary advising center locally and over the next few years, I worked with several hundred clients either for weight loss or health issues. David went ahead to Madrid because as you can gather, he gets headhunted quite frequently. This time though, I said, hold on a minute, we’ve just bought a new house. We’ve got a new dog and I’ve got a new business. If we leave now, we’re going to lose all the money on the house.
[00:20:29] Sally: So I followed three years later, but his company paid for us to travel both ways, so we saw each other every three weeks. Uh, David would come home for five days, uh, and I would go over to Spain five days at a time. But it actually worked out that when I finally left three years later, I put the dog in the car and drove down to Madrid from Ireland. And then we lived there for 17 years.
[00:20:56] Louise: How many?
[00:20:57] Sally: We had the house for 17 years.
[00:20:59] Louise: Seventeen years! Oh, a really extended period of time!
[00:21:03] Sally: Well it is for us.
[00:21:04] Louise: Yes it is, that’s what I mean!
[00:21:07] Sally: Essentially we had the house for 17 years, which meant we had a home. But when David left his job, he made the decision to take early retirement because it was a very high pressure job. And I said, well, I’d rather have you at 65, but I think if you stay in that job, it’s going to be much more difficult. So Trafford, who published my first book, asked me to recruit and work with English- speaking authors in Spain. And so we actually bought a place down in the south, on the Costa Del Sol and during the winter, we were up about 900 meters up a mountain, when it was snowing, we would head down to the Costa and stay there. Uh, we had an apartment; David started to do my formatting, but he also started doing the formatting for other authors as well.
[00:21:58] Sally: I decided to take Size Matters into the English-speaking radio station and drop it off with a note saying, ‘I’ve written this book, if you feel your readers would be interested, I’d be delighted to do an interview.’ And as I was standing there, the program director came out, rather upset because her guest, who was a well known ballet dancer, had rung to cancel at the last minute. And she saw me and the book on the counter and asked if I would come into the studio right there and then for an interview, and I didn’t leave for four years. I was the nutritional consultant for the morning show for three years. So I always say to authors for goodness sake, drop your books off at the local radio station.
[00:22:39] Louise: Did you have a lot of call-in guests who had questions about the health segment you presented?
[00:22:46] Sally: Yes, it was great. We did have one slight mishap because one time we needed to jazz things up a bit. So, um, I played two parts on the radio at the same time, a lady called Fatima Capri, who was a 300-pound sex therapist who came onto the show. Well, of course you can imagine you’ve got all these calls coming in.
[00:23:12] Louise: I bet you did.
[00:23:12] Sally: And bless her heart, she was not as political as she could have been. Um, and so we were banned by the sister radio station, further up the coast.
[00:23:23] Louise: Well, it sounds like you also did get to go into your first love, which is the performance arts.
[00:23:28] Sally: We did have a lot of fun. It was great fun.
[00:23:31] Louise: That’s wonderful. So then your radio work in Spain led to TV and broadcasting work back in the UK. Is that right?
[00:23:40] Sally: Yes. When I came back to look after my mother, first part-time, and then a couple of years later, full-time, I’d written another health book, which was called Just Food For Health, which is a family health manual. It covered all the major organs, the body, the systems such as the digestive, reproductive, and the immune system. Along with the various health issues and also providing the foods that supplied the nutrients that supported them. This was 360 pages, big book. So I did the usual trick, I dropped the book off at the local radio station and they rang and asked me to come in for an interview. That led to my own health show on Thursday afternoons, to co-presenting drive times and the Sunday morning chat show.
[00:24:17] Sally: Eventually I was asked to move over to a startup online television station where I was initially a newsreader and chat show host, interviewing visiting celebrities and local politicians, including two astronauts from NASA, which was very exciting. Um, and this led to outside broadcast and then I became station director for the last year. And then I run my own production company for a year doing documentaries and videos for university or businesses.
[00:24:44] Louise: This is such a rich period of your life. And it seems to have come about as a result of this book Size Matters.
[00:24:51] Sally: Yes, again, I can’t stress enough how, uh, marketing your book, especially your first book, locally is so important. These days where we’ve got global network of, uh, Amazon, for example, the first thing that people do is put it on Amazon. Absolutely. Especially if it’s an ebook, you want to get the international market. But basically if you are living in an area where you come from, or live, then you will find that there is often local interest in the media about this book you’ve written and it’s amazing even doing it at a local level. I did mine at a local level, but I got national recognition for that because people listened to the local media in the press and on the radio and say, ‘oh, hang on a minute, that might be quite interesting for us.’
[00:25:44] Sally: So I always advise the authors that I talk to about book marketing, if you can focus locally, get something in the press, go on the radio, drop the book off with a note and your CV and say that you’d love to come for an interview. They’re always looking for interesting guests. And have you done that with your books?
[00:26:04] Louise: You’re quite right. My ability to market the books locally has been somewhat easy. It has been easy to do in-person presentation and online presentations locally. And because there is such a huge interest, particularly in the US, uh, from folks who want to move to Portugal, I have a pretty guaranteed audience in the US too, because they either find the book searching for books about moving to Portugal or they find it through the podcast. That’s rather delightful actually, cause I do have women reaching out to me to ask me about moving to Portugal and about the book, et cetera. So yes, you’re quite right, marketing locally and then taking that internationally through various platforms is a great way to market your book.
[00:26:52] Louise: Now this is actually something that you’re ultimately doing now. You’re a very successful published author of 14 books, but now that you sort of at retirement age and you’re not retired, one of the things you do do is give a lot of your time and energy to supporting other writers on your blog and on your podcast.
[00:27:13] Sally: Well, I know how hard it is. I mean, when I started out, there was nothing online. It was all local or national. You had to send out press releases in snail mail. There was no access for marketing your book other than doing the legwork or sending out copies with notes, um, and press releases to media. These days, of course we have social media, we have blogging, we have podcasting. So it really is a book marketing dream. The only downside to it of course, is that there are 20,000 e-books published or uploaded to Amazon every week. So when you’ve got millions of books, and of course there’s so many genres today, and if you’re writing within a popular genre, you are likely to be one of 20,000 books going up there, or certainly several thousand within your popular genre. And it is very difficult to get your head above the parapet as far as your book is concerned.
[00:28:14] Sally: So when I set up the blog 10 years ago, it was to market my own books. And I soon realized that as I grew my Twitter and my Facebook and LinkedIn, mainly Twitter and Facebook, that it also meant that I could offer those people, those contacts to others. I wasn’t interested in monetizing my blog and it still is not monetized. I’m not an Amazon associate or anything like that. I decided that, particularly for indie authors, it was important that there was somebody in their corner. And so that’s why I have evolved the blog to the point where it is today.
[00:28:58] Sally: I have taken a slight step back this year. Before the cafe and bookstore for authors, I would regularly promote them, their recent reviews, et cetera. Now it is the Smorgasbord Bookshelf and all the books on that are ones that I can personally recommend and have reviewed. So there’s still a 120 authors in there. And I do features for them. Now, your book, for example, which I have reviewed, your books will be in the bookshelf.
[00:29:27] Sally: And then whenever I do a special feature, like the one coming up, which is sharing an extract from your most recent book, anybody who’s on the bookshelf can send 500 words in and they will get a special feature. Every book that is in the bookshelf, I can put my hand on heart, I’ve read this, I enjoyed it. I can recommend it. Because I discovered that people are getting leery about some of the reviews on Amazon, for example. So I felt that if I could say I put my name behind this, then perhaps that might add a little bit extra.
[00:30:06] Sally: It is so important to have an online presence as an author. People say, I don’t really have the time to do Twitter and Facebook and all that. Well, I made the time and I’ve got around about 50,000 followers now on combined social media. And I know then that when I put my own book out, and to be honest with you, the vast majority are authors, so they’re also readers and that’s the other mistake that people make. They say I got 50,000 followers and I say, yeah and how many of them are authors and readers?
[00:30:47] Sally: Because you know, there’s an awful lot out there who just are there to promote whatever they’re doing, but it’s nothing to do with reading books. And whilst I follow everybody, I can because as a writer, I don’t say don’t follow anybody except authors, because as a writer, you’re looking for new input and you’re looking for new characters. You’re looking for new environments, you’re looking for different storylines. And if you only restrict yourself to following authors, you’re missing out on other people who are doing other creative work, or people who are book reviewers or people who have colorful lives. So it is important that you have a good mixture of peoples that you’re following.
[00:31:29] Louise: Yes.
[00:31:29] Sally: And hopefully they follow you back.
[00:31:31] Louise: Yes. Yes. So in other words, what you’re saying is you really need to be strategic about your marketing and clear who your audience is and clear too how you can do a mutual win-win exchange of information or book sharing. You’ve referred to the fact that that’s what we’re doing. And this podcast has ended up being a wonderful platform for me to talk to, to other women who are writing about their adventures and their travels and so on. Probably 50% or more of the women I’ve interviewed have written something about their life journey, which is wonderful.
[00:32:06] Sally: And then don’t you feel a satisfaction, Louise, in knowing that you’re doing that.
[00:32:10] Louise: Oh absolutely.
[00:32:10] Sally: It’s wonderful, when one of them comes to you, ‘oh, I’ve sold some books from being on your podcast or on your blog.’ And that is just so satisfying.
[00:32:19] Louise: Well, this is the nature of being an indie author. It really behooves us to be generous with our time and our sharing, because there’s, as you indicated, plenty of readers out there, you just have to find them and we can find them together. So on that note, Sally, how can listeners find you?
[00:32:37] Sally: Right. Well, my blog is called Smorgasbord Blog Magazine because it is quite varied. And that is SmorgasbordInvitation.wordpress.com. I’m on Facebook as Sally Georgina Cronin and on Twitter it’s very easy @SGC58.
[00:32:58] Louise: Okay. Well, I will put those in the transcript to this episode, which will be on my website. And if listeners would like to reach out to you, they can find all the details on the transcript on Louise Ross.com. Well, thanks so much, Sally. Thanks for your time today.
[00:33:14] Sally: Thank you for inviting me over for a chat and thank you very much for the invitation to chat about my adventures.
[00:33:20] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel, Women Who Walk Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple or Podchaser, I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, on my website, LouiseRoss.com.