Ryan and I are heading back to Antarctica with Ice Axe Expeditions on November 24th. We originally planned our return to the White Continent in 2020 as a thrilling way to end Without Restraint, and COVID obviously altered those plans. But even if this second trip will be an unwritten chapter of both our lives, Ryan will continue growing under the leadership of Doug Stoup and his expert guiding staff, and I’m committed to hiking and skiing better than I did in 2018.
If not for our previous expedition to Antarctica, we would have never written a book at all. On that trip, our ship’s Wi-Fi was damaged from high winds, and we spent ten days absent contact with the outside world. It was glorious. Phones were nothing more than cameras and dinners were spent talking and laughing rather than checking Twitter and Facebook. Moreover, downtime was pensive and reflective, and as the shipped tossed in the Drake Passage, I proposed the book idea to Ryan. We then spent a few hours a day typing on our phones to flush out competing versions of his life story.
I wish I could say that a few drafts later, we had a working manuscript, but a published work takes hundreds and hundreds of hours. We spent a year writing and another year rewriting. We sought editing help from friends and family and eventually lucked into professional guidance from Lindsay Newton at Newton Literary Services. It was Lindsay who first convinced me that we had a shot at landing an agent and her direction on the submission process led us to Erin Clyburn, our terrific agent.
Erin’s tactical brilliance on targeting certain publishers helped land a deal with Globe Pequot/Rowman & Littlefield, and now Without Restraint is in preorder as we finalize the editing process.
It has been an amazing journey and although that word is probably overused, it works. Ryan’s life story is a journey. One with many chapters to go. And parenting him was, and still sometimes is, a journey. A journey with several early missteps, but because I changed after we started skiing, one with a very different trajectory than what might have been.
I hope this excerpt from Without Restraint provides a glimpse….
…As I sat alone on the rear deck during our final day of sailing, I allowed myself to be judged by the one person I had never managed to please: myself. Like any person approaching a milestone birthday, I had suffered my share of days spent pondering my existence—wondering if I was making an impact on the world. Yet, as I looked out across the Beagle Channel, there was one aspect of my life that I knew, with certainty, had mattered. My refusal to give up on Ryan changed his world, and that was plenty.