Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: So we're here with Landall Proctor, whose memoir Headwinds is about an attempt to bike around the perimeter of the United States riding 10,000 miles in 100 days. So first of all, just tell me about that decision. What made you decide? Hey, this is what I'm doing now?
Landall: I talk about it a little bit in the foreword of the book. I think the absolute objective like answer to that question is, I was in my early twenties and I was working a job that I was really unhappy, and my boss also happened to be a friend of mine. And so it made conversations about being like, unhappy with that job really, really sort of challenging. And I didn't have the emotional maturity to have those difficult conversations. And so I was looking for an out, but in a way that didn't result in some sort of like drag out blowout conversation where we like, left mad at each other.
A friend of mine mentioned that in college he rode his bike- he went to college in Chicago and his family had a house on the coast of Maine, and he convinced his girlfriend at the time that they should ride there instead of driving or flying. So they did, and the story was just filled with mishaps and hilarity and and all sorts of things, and ended with his girlfriend literally got to their family's house and said, “This relationship’s over. Take me to the airport.”
It was just such a great story that it sort of planted a seed in my head that I felt like, you know, I would like to ride my bike across the country, and it's sort of connected the dots with, like, Oh, well, my boss won't get mad at me if I'm quitting because I want to go on this epic adventure. It was not something that I have had sort of in the back of my mind for years, and planned and planned and planned and was prepared for. As readers would find out, I was very ill prepared for the trip from a logistic standpoint, pretty much from the start the stars aligned in a way that just made me think like sure, why not? I could do that.
Mindy: The early twenties is the time to do something like that. It's when you feel invincible and also like you're an adult now. I remember my early twenties. I got married in my early twenties.
Landall: I graduated from college with a religious studies degree with no interest in doing anything related to religion. And in 2006, we weren't like at the height of the job crash, I guess, we sort of, like, historically look on it now. But it wasn't exactly like a plentiful job market to roll into with sort of a non applicable degree to, like, you know, sustaining like employment. So I moved back in with my parents. I was living at home at the time. All the ways, like embarrassing. But what it did do is it gave me the opportunity to be able to do this trip because I had no obligations. I didn't have, like, rent that I had to pay when I was gone or a lease to get out of. I wasn't in a long term relationship. So the timing in that aspect also worked out well.
Mindy: As someone that also has a degree in religious studies, I can back you up on that really hard. I graduated from college with a degree in English literature and a degree in religious studies. No desire to teach. Didn’t have the qualifications to teach either. I didn't major in education, so I didn't want to teach. I didn't want to go into the ministry in any way. And I was like, Well, I mean, I feel very educated, but I'm not employable. So I got married, like that was my answer. You moved in with your parents. I got married. I think it’s Interesting, the freedom aspect being a huge contributor to your decision. I really like that. So how much time had passed then, in between you making this trip and then making the decision to write it down?
Landall: Right before I left for the trip a friend of mine who was like a critical component to letting me even be able to, like get myself together and the capacity of acquiring equipment and plans and things like that right before I left, handed me a moleskin journal. He's like your book will come from here, you know, And at that time it wasn't a thing that I'd even considered, but I did. I journaled every night just would write down the things that happened. Whatever funny interactions, stories, whatever, like, came to mind at the end of each day. And when I got back from the trip, I opened up that journal and I read through it and I sat down and I would start writing and would almost immediately stop. For all the reasons someone starts and stops writing a book, you know, I would overthink like what kind of book it was supposed to be.
I remember very distinctly at the time when I was planning for the trip, I was just desperate because I didn't have a big, like I said, a lot of experience in terms of doing these types of things. So I was desperate to just read other people's experiences and what they encountered or what they did. And from a bike packing--which the term didn't even exist in 2006-- but from a bike packing experience like, no one had written about that. There just wasn't anything out there. And so I ended up reading like Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. They weren't helpful from a like, Here's how you do this and don't die perspective. And so when I got back, I was like, Well, maybe that's what I should write about
And then I was like, Well, but like, I didn't even -- spoiler -- didn't even finish my set out loop of the country. Who's going to take my advice on, like how to do this thing, you know? And so I just could never get settled on what the book was supposed to be. And I would also get caught up in self doubt. And like all who wants to read anything I'm going to write? And those types of things. And so just the project always just got pushed aside fast forward then, like many, many years. So in the fall of 2019, me and my ex wife, who we were living in Detroit at the time, decided we didn't really want to live in Detroit anymore. We neither one of us wanted a custody battle with our kid. We sat down and figured out a place that we could move together and we settled on Berkeley, California.
I'm a software developer. I was kind of burned out from it. And so I took the opportunity during that move to just not look for another job. You know, I had some savings. I was going to be able to sustain myself. And I thought, you know, now is the time. You know, now is the time to, like, write that book, and I still didn't quite know what kind of book it was gonna be. But I guess I just was like, age and maturity. I decided that I wasn't gonna let that be the thing that got in the way. This time I was just going to start writing the stories, see what it ended up being, And I hope that it would inform itself through the process. So it was 14 years between coming back from the trip and before I actually sat down and, you know, hammering out pages.
Mindy: I've never written a memoir, but I really do think that that would be a great approach because you have distance from those experiences and those stories, and you're actually coming to those journals, into your own writing in that period of your own life with a different perspective than you had in that moment. Because you have 14 more years of experience. What was your experience then coming back to these stories 14 years later? Were there things that you had forgotten? Were there things that surprised you? Were there things that you were like? Man, I wish I would have done that differently.
Landall: I mean, without the journal, there's no way I would have been able to write even remotely half these stories. There are things like reading the journal, I was surprised at how vividly details of conversations would like come back to me, where without that journal, I had completely forgotten the person I've had that conversation with, like, existed on the planet. It was really amazing how our brain works in that capacity, right? I think you're exactly right. The space between and allowing for my own worldview to develop further and create a little bit more of a nuanced realization of how different people see The world, I think, allowed me to like write some of the interactions and stories from the book in a way that if I had done it in 2006, I would have still been, like, amped up on the rage of them putting me in an awkward position to talk about.
I got proselytized quite a bit by people that I would stay with and at the time. And I didn't want that. You know, I didn't ask for them to be like, concerned about my soul. You know, I would be like, really angry that this was happening to me. If I had written that in 2006, I would have been like these assholes blah, blah, you know? But I just think like the way that I wrote it now with some space and like, they view things differently than me. I didn't appreciate what they were doing, and I still didn't like it. They were doing what they thought was the thing. And so I tried in those cases to leave some space for whoever's reading it to determine their own sort of, like take on those situations, right? Maybe they side with the people who wanted to save my soul for Jesus. Or maybe they side with me. The kid who just, like, wanted to drink some coffee and get back on the road. 2006 version of me would have been like, You must side with me on this.
Mindy: Your twenties are kind of polarizing. You're always right. I truly wish I would have kept a journal when I was younger. Not necessarily in my twenties, perhaps in my teens. Not that I did anything amazing than either, but what's astonishing to me - You're right. The brain is not quite the functioning machine that we believe it is. And I have done so much reading. I read a lot of nonfiction, and I've done some reading about how we don't Medical science doesn't necessarily understand how our brains even really work and memory, especially. It's something I've read a lot about. It's a malleable thing. It's just like ballast, like they'll just drop stuff we don't need and aren't using.
And I'll have conversations with people from high school or people from college that will be like, Yeah, then this happened, and this happened and you did this and it was so cool this thing that you did or so funny and I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like I don't remember being there. Was I drunk? What? Are you, Are you sure that was me? I have no recollection of this. And they're like, No, dude, like that was the thing. You were there, man. That sounds interesting. I don't remember.
And funnily enough, I even have experiences Where my dad, if I'll talk about something that he has that reaction to where he's like, Yeah, I don't remember that at all. And he'll be like, You dreamt that. That's just his dismissive answer. He's like no, you dreamt it. I don't know what you're talking about. And so sometimes I'll even have moments where I'm like Wait a minute. Am I making this up? Did I dream that? Did that really happen, or has my author's brain created this narrative around this thing that is not reality. Like that is not what happened.
So many people I know journal and I admire them for that. I personally... my therapist has been like many times - you should journal. I've never written a word just because so much of my life is words. Freelance editing. I write, you know, the podcast on the blog, and it's like words are work for me. So I think your story is definitely a notch in The belt for people that journal.
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Mindy: I want to talk a little bit about something. You had written a guest post on my blog for me and one of the things that you talked about specifically was one of the first roadblocks. And for me, I think, and for many other people who were to consider writing a memoir is you know, who the hell cares? What is the audience for this? Exposing yourself, first of all to assuming that anybody is going to care about your story. But then also, the question of how vulnerable am I going to make myself? And how honest, am I going to be? How revealing am I going to be? And you already said you didn't actually achieve your goal. And yet you still are writing this book and sharing these stories. So talk to me a little bit about that just in this role of, What the hell is even the point here and anyway, number one. And number two - how much of my true self and true experience am I going to share?
Landall: So I think there's actually sort of, like, two answers to that question. The first is I didn't finish the loop piece because I struggled with that quite a bit, like even after the trip. And obviously I talk about it, um, in the book itself. But the trip, as it was set out, was a totally arbitrary goal. The way that I came to trying to do an entire loop was really like a random node on my thought path, where I had read an article years previous, about a motorcycle trip where, the Honda Gold Wing. Those big like touring motorcycles, when the new version was coming out, they had set up these four different guys To each ride up, essentially to the four corners of the U. S. The one guy would ride from, like Key West to some point in Maine, and then he would hand it off to another guy. And then that guy rode it from Maine to Seattle. And then he handed it off to another guy and that guy, and so they connected the four corners of the US that way.
And so as I was thinking about the trip and most people just ride across the country again, like early twenties bravado, I was like, I guess I could ride across the country. But instead I could also - and my head thought back to this article - and I thought I could connect all four corners and not realize how absurd that would be. But also how arbitrary that was as well. It was absolutely my goal to complete that loop, but it was also completely invented by me. Still, I did not accomplish what I set out to do. That really grated on me for just years.
And then Cheryl Strayed - and I'm not comparing myself to her in any capacity is a writer - But Wild came out. And then here was a story of someone who had gone on this established hiking route, the PCT, and she didn't finish it, But yet she wrote a book about it and clearly like the parallels between our stories ends there, you know, like we don't have a lot of other things in common. You know, she didn't finish the entire Pacific Crest Trail. And then so in the back of my head, I was like Huh? I haven't heard a single person say like, Oh, this is a good story. But what about the Washington portion of the trip that she didn't do?
Realizing that did not make me immediately, like run to my computer and start writing. It was still years before I sat down and wrote Headwinds, but it did at least plant a seed that like Oh, like, maybe my own internal hang up on not finishing isn't as big of a deal to other people as it has been to me. And maybe there's something in that to be like, poked and prodded.
And so what made me think that people would want to read it? I don't know if they do want to read it. There's a lot of people that were integral parts of this trip that I always wanted to tell them all of the stories but never had time. Invite them over for dinner and say here, Please sit while I hold court for, you know, 10 hours and tell you every story of my bike trip, right? And so there were just lots of stories. There's lots of funny stories that make the highlight reel as I'm sitting around with friends in bars. I accidentally spent the night at a nudist colony, and by accident part, I mean my mom set me up to do that, and did not inform me ahead of time until large, naked people on golf carts were driving past me as I made my way to the to the office to check in.
Those stories make the rotation right, like somebody says tell me about your trip. Everybody thinks the nudist colony stories are funny. So I'll tell that one. But there's lots of other stories that never got told. I wanted to tell the people who, like, really helped with the trip. Just yesterday, in fact, I got a text message from one of those people. She was like, Look, I don't read any book slowly, but I'm reading yours so slow because while I thought we talked about it a lot and I knew a lot of these stories, she's like, I'm discovering new things that, like I had no idea about, and I'm just really enjoying the rest of the stories. The ones she was unaware of.
And so I think like when I sat down to write it, I didn't know who would be interested, but I sort of viewed it as a very long thank you note to the people that helped the trip come to fruition. Way back in 2006. I didn't and I don't have grand aspirations for this book to change the way that I support myself or my family. So I think taking that pressure off of it allowed me to worry less about who would potentially want to read this thing and know that I had, like, an audience that I just wanted to tell these stories to as sort of a thank you. And then if I could get even more people to read it than that, then that's great. That's fantastic, that just icing on the cake.
Mindy: I love what you're saying about arbitrary goals, especially because I have always been an athlete. As an adult, I certainly haven't been competitive, but when we went into lockdown last winter, my gym closed, you know, and I'm like, Oh, crap, because I had always been active, but I usually went to the gym. It's a CrossFit gym. I went to the gym like twice a week. That was kind of it. So when everything shut down, I was like, Oh, man, you're going to have to do this on your own. You're going to make your own rules.
So you know, I went and my gym was posting workouts online for you to do at home. So I went to town and I bought myself a kettle bell and a Wall ball and some free weights. I started running. I've never been a runner. I've never been good at running. I played softball and basketball. Running was punishment for doing your sport wrong. I live in the middle of nowhere. And in the lock down world, it was just like, Well, you have all the time and running is free. So go do it.
So I started running and I was working out every night. For the very first time in my life, I ran a mile. The only reason I even managed it was because it was very, very foggy out. So I couldn't see the stop sign that represented the mile, so I had no idea, really, how much longer I had to go. I just kept going. And I was like, and then I got there and I'm like, I actually feel okay, so the lock down helped me get to a point where I could run a 5K. Pretty much like every morning I would wake up, run a 5K, and then work out in the evenings. And I am here at 41 probably the healthiest and the strongest that I've been in my life.
All that being said last night, I go to the gym and we had a CrossFit workout. It was a good workout. I won't recite the whole workout, but it was a hundred reps of seven different movements, and the very last one was we had to do 100 Burpees at the end of the workout. It sucked. And it's like when I saw the board, I was like, Oh, shit. I didn't do it. I couldn't... I actually could not do it. So we did like, I think, you know, 100 wall balls, 100 sit ups, 100 push ups, 100 whatever's, squats. And then it was time to do 100 Burpees. And I think I did 50 and I quit and I have never quit a workout before, ever. And I went home last night just feeling like shit. I was like dude What the hell is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? You couldn't do 100 Burpees. I stopped and I thought about it. I was like, Okay, however, a year ago, you couldn't have done the first two reps. Like you couldn't have done the first two activities. So shut the hell up, Mindy. And so I do think we set these arbitrary goals for ourselves. Good for us for being humble people. But if I don't hit my goals, I'm just like you're a piece of shit, right? It's like I'm pissed at myself and I don't recognize everything that I did write up before I quit.
Landall: You'll go back to your cross fit gym the next time, and everyone will be happy to see you, you know, and they'll be asking you how your day's been going, what have you been up to. And then, you know, no one's going to say like, Hey, what have you done to improve on those like 50 Burpees that you didn't do?
That was my experience too. I got home, I got back to my folks place and I just was hiding in my bedroom. Hoping that, like I didn't even tell my friends that I was back, you know? I guess, someone saw me. My buddy Cary texted me and he's like, Hey, rumor has it you're back in town. Is that true? And I was, you know, like hesitantly.. I probably wrote like four different responses before finally sending off like, Yes I'm back. And he's like, Cool, let's go to dinner and you tell me some stories. Nobody cared. No one cared that I didn't complete this full loop. Like every person that I was nervous, that I had let down in some capacity, just wanted to, they just wanted to hear stories. They wanted to tell me how happy they were that I didn't die, you know, like apparently a lot of people thought I was going to die.
So they were just all very, very happy. And another component of the trip was I raised money for the local Meals on Wheels program. I wrote a check for a little over $5000 to them for the trip, which, which felt really nice. And so I went in to call them. It was like, Hey, I'm back. I'd love to, like, give you guys the check and they're like, Oh, yeah, come on in for lunch one day and they had set up like a full, like the entire, all the volunteers and staff and everything were just like in this like room. And it was all people who I had never seen before because I'd only really been in contact with, like, a few folks from the organization. Who are all these people and why do they care? They wanted to hear stories. It was all very emotionally overwhelming. It's sort of reiterated that these are arbitrary goals. They're great to set. You should obviously work very hard to achieve things that you set out to do. But sometimes the failure part of that is more in our head than maybe our peers or friends care about.
Mindy: Absolutely. I have a lifting partner. We don't work out that often together because he's a dude. We usually pair off girls, girls, guys, guys. But if there's an uneven amount he and I will work together. He lifts more than I do. But we lift at about the same rate of speed. Like some people really fly through workouts. I think more about my form and like trying to do things right. But also, it's like I'll stop. I gotta stop. I gotta take a drink of water. I gotta wipe my forehead. I gotta blow my nose. You know, he and I work at about the same rate. It wasn't a partner workout last night. We weren't paired up, but he was already done. So he was giving me a hard time because that's just what we do. We just give each other shit. That's part of a gym. Like he was like counting my reps partially To, screw with me, but partially also like, encouraging me to keep going. And I looked at the clock and I've been working out for 45 minutes and I was like, I'm done and he's like, No, come on, He's like, you can do this. You only have 50 more left. I was like No, dude, I actually can't. I physically am not able to do 50 more Burpees. It’s not gonna happen. And you know, at first he did what a good training partner does, which is like, Yeah, you can! Come on, let's go And he's even like, I'll do them with you. Let's go! And I was like, No, I'm done. And he saw it in my face that I was done and he was like, Okay, he's like, That's cool. That's cool. I'll leave you alone. He's going to, I'm sure, give me shit about it tonight. He will also be glad that, like you said, be glad that I show up and then I come back. It was the first time I'd ever quit a workout. He's still my friend and is still impressed that I show up every day. So, you know, it's like Yeah, I couldn't do 100 burpees at that particular moment in my life. I thought I was gonna puke. I have yet to. I have pissed my pants, but I have not puked.
Landall: I’ve had that experience, but I have vomited during workouts before, but I think sometimes because I thought if I did it would make for a better story to tell my friends afterwards. I'm not sure that I’ve ever peed my pants though.
Mindy: I was pretty proud of pissing my pants, to be honest with you, because that’s like a rite of passage. So I told everybody. I was like - pissed my pants. It’s a lot easier for women to piss their pants than it is for men. I'll just say that.
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Mindy: Last thing I want to talk to you about is the decision To actually move towards publishing. So you've written the book. You had the book. Now you're at the moment of deciding the method, the mode of publishing. So there's traditional publishing, attempting to get an agent and move through the traditional publishing world or self published or use an indie publisher. So what was your process there?
Landall: I had a manuscript, right? So I sat down and I wrote the whole thing out and had, like, a first draft. I thought that my best bet, going back to the idea that, like, if this thing turned out to just be a very long thank you note to the people that helped, I was going to be totally content with that outcome. And so From that point, I was like, Okay, well, I want to keep working towards that goal so that I had something to give to people.
So I hired an Editor. So then it became, instead of the writing process, it was going through and editing, and we went through it four times. We made a lot of decisions on what stories should stay and go. The first version, The Rough Draft, the first one that she started with 730 pages. The current published version in six by nine paperback is like 334 pages. So quite a bit of stories got cut for a variety of reasons.
To get to the crux of your question, I felt that my best chance if I was gonna have a publisher have any interest in this was to present them as close to a polished version as possible. And so we got to the point where we were happy with where we were at. I wrote up a couple proposals. I figured sending it to large publishing houses was not going to result in anything just cause I’m a complete, unknown entity, you know? So I thought maybe some small publishers that specialized in outdoor adventure or memoirs and things like that would be open to the idea of the project. Sent them off. And then it became like that waiting game, and it just... I had no confidence that I was going to get a positive response back from any of these publishers that they wanted it, but not from a like, I don't think this is good enough, but from a like you don't know who I am. I'm sure that you're wading through hundreds of these proposals at any given time.
I just decided that I was tired of kind of waiting to see it, like in print, since the last time I looked into self publishing like the whole world seems to have changed, right? You don't have to order 1000 copies of your own book and store them in your living room and try to peddle them through your own website anymore. Right? So I just used Amazon KDP. And so I don't have any of those overhead costs. And so, you know, I wasn't gonna have to shell out thousands of dollars of my own money to get the printing per unit costs down to something stomachable.
I just decided. You know what? This is the way that I could see this thing in print and I could start sending out some of these thank you notes. So that's what I did. It just sort of, like met the needs. And the central goal of this project was to get it out there and not necessarily Like I said, I don't think that this is going to change the way that I'm supporting my family. And so, waiting on a publisher, I felt like I had been working on it long enough, and I wanted To see it live. So I just made that decision to go ahead and go the self publishing route.
Mindy: That is true of so many people that I talk to that have self published. And I totally understand that urge. I write under a pen name as well with some friends and all that is self published stuff. And most of it in my world, I write very dark, very gritty and realistic fiction. Everything that I write is pretty rough around the edges. But I have ideas that are fun or silly or just, you know, off the wall and bonkers. And I can't really ever print those under my real name because it would skew my brand so badly. And it's something that I've talked with my agent about, especially about one of the very first books I ever finished, and she was just like, Yeah, it's great and it's fun, But it goes against your brand so hard that publishers gonna have a hard time marketing this and I was like, Yeah, I get it. That makes sense.
But it's a book that I care about. I don't know. I mean again, it's not going to change the world. It's silly. It's a fun beach read. That's not what I write, but I did write it I can write that. I enjoy writing it. So eventually here, hopefully this year, I'm going to be self publishing that under my pen name because it's fun. I like writing. It doesn't have the depth and the smack in the face that my writing under my real name does. And that's fine. It still has value. It still has worth, and I have fun making it. So my opinion, much like the self publishing world, has changed. How I feel about and view self publishing has changed very much in the past 10 years.
Landall: I should say, like Maybe as a caveat, You know, if someone from some you know, publishing house is listening to this and they want to talk,I look like I'm open to negotiation, right? I'm happy to have that. I'm happy to have that conversation.
At the time. It felt like, you know, I wrote every day during that break between jobs to get all the words down and get the story out. I just felt this sort of anxiety over the waiting period that was inevitable with trying to, you know, to shop it properly and stuff. And I was just like, man, I just like I don't know if I have that in me, I wanna hold it, You know?
Mindy: We call it a book, baby, but it is very much like having a baby. You grow it for nine months. It's in there. People can kind of interact with it, but you haven't... you wanna be like, here's the thing that I made, right? And like I said, my opinions about self publishing have changed because the industry itself has changed dramatically. But I would never tell someone that they have made a mistake or gone the easy route by going with self publishing. It has its own trials and tribulations and they are different from trad publishing. But they’re there.
Landall: Also like a couple other independent authors that I have discovered who started with self publishing too, and I enjoyed their books so much, and I was like, Man, these guys are such talented writers. If they’re as good as they are and they self published, it sort of took some of that - If there was gonna be a stigma about it, which I didn't really feel - but if there was like that would have completely taken it away, these guys were great.
Mindy: The pool of talent in self publishing is very, very different than it was 10 to 15 years ago for sure. Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book Headwinds and where they can find you online?
Landall: Landall Proctor dot com Is my little space on the Internet. There's a link to your Headwinds there where you could get more information. There's a link, so it's available on Amazon readily. Iif you happen to live in Berkeley, California and you want to buy from a local bookstore, Books Inc on Shattuck Avenue is carrying it, which is really cool. There's a couple copies available there. I'd love for them to get purchased so they want more of them. You can find me on Instagram @Landall basically like with a name like Landall, I don't have to have interesting social media handles. I'm on Facebook as well. I'm pretty easy to find.
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