Hey everybody. Welcome to my guest tonight. I'm Jeff Revilla, your host.
I've got an amazing guest joining me tonight, Teri M.
Brown. Author, podcast host, inspirational speaker,
double butted adventure.
She pedaled coast to coast chasing
dreams and finding light from
heartbreak to healing under
stars and morning light
with tales of fiction, truth and
flight It's
Teri and Brown on my guest
tonight. Double but
adventure a journey so
real Jack reveals the
host with a might and some
zeal Tune in now,
don't miss the ride
My guest and I let the stories
collide. Teri, welcome
to the show. That is a first. I have never had a song
made for me before. I, I could just go home right now and be done.
This is great. Well, I hope to tease the show a little bit and tell
a little bit about your story. A little foreshadowing and, and, and
full transparency. You're the first guest I didn't tell that I did that for.
So you got it actually in the moment and you got to react to
it without even knowing it was coming. So Well, I think you should do that
for all your guests because there was something written out really, there was something
really cool about that. So I loved it. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That's been
the reaction too. I've out of the. This is probably episode 17
or 18 and I'm 16 for 16 on people loving
their song for them. Yes, absolutely. It's great. So
I'm looking through your notes and I also have about 10 pages of notes on
you. I got a lot of stuff to cover tonight. We have about 30 minutes
to do it. And I mentioned I think you were an air. He's called a
self defraud described air force brat that was born in Greece.
Tell us a little bit about, you know, where you came from and how'd you
get to Greece. So I was in Greece because my dad was in the air
force and we were in a little town outside of Athens. It was a
joint air force base. They didn't even have a clinic
on base. And so I was born in an Athens hospital. My mother was
20 years old. She spoke no Greek and her doctor spoke no English.
And so I can't even imagine like I have four children and I cannot
even imagine being in a foreign country as a 20 year old
giving birth to you to a baby. That's just crazy. We
lived there for a couple of years. I really don't have any remembrance
of it. I've been back since with my mom, but I don't have any remembrance
of it. When I was a kid and then I lived in Ohio,
eventually moved to North Carolina when I was in high school.
And yeah, I kind of went from there. Kind of.
Kind of went all over the place. And it looks like you studied in North
Carolina, ended up going to college in North Carolina. Yeah, I went to UNC
Greensboro. At the time, I had zero
idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. None. And my parents
knew that. They wanted me to get a degree in something that would give me
a job. So, like, creative writing was never going to be that
thing. So that wasn't even considered, unfortunately for
them. I got two majors and two minors and never used any of it.
So I have a degree in education. I have a degree
in psychology, and I have a minor in
sociology and a minor in math. And I never really used any of
it. I guess I'm using all of it now as a writer, but I didn't
really use any of it for this big paid occupation they thought they were paying
for. And it's a very common theme. A lot of
creatives that I've met so far doing the show is they went to school
with one intention, but something kind of steered them away into
another direction. And when you came out of college, what were your first
steps? You know, you're in the real world now. What, you got these
degrees. What are you going to do next? So I ended up working
for a bank. I had been a bank teller for a while, and then I
did something. They called it proofing. They don't even do that now. And that's when
the checks would come through. And there was a proof operator
that would sit there and key in so that the amount of
the check would be keyed in at the bottom, right along where
account numbers were. And the faster you went, the more they paid
you. And I was really fast on that keyboard. And so for a long
time I just did that because I couldn't find another job that would pay me
that kind of money. Then I ended up getting married.
I had four children. I decided to homeschool. So I
pretty much was home with my kids about
the time that they were, oh, middle school to
like middle of elementary was. That was the age range.
We really needed me to have an income. I had to do something. And so
I started writing for small businesses. You figure
in 2000, the Internet was a relatively new thing,
and there were a lot of small companies that were putting their. Their
businesses out. They were getting their very first website, and what they were putting on
them was really horrible. You know, I can't even begin to tell you
the terrible descriptions and things they had. And I
realized, you know, this is something I can do, and I can do this from
home in time, around my children. And so I started
doing that. I did that for nearly 20 years.
In that period of time, I got a divorce. I remarried.
And that second marriage was probably the biggest mistake of my life.
He was emotionally abusive. But I didn't want to be
divorced twice. So I stuck with it for 14 years.
And it was during that time that I started to think I really want to
be an actual writer, like an author. I want to write my books. But
that isn't a safe time to do it. When you're. When you're living with someone
who can't say anything nice to you and you don't feel like you're good enough
anyway, taking all of your creative juices and then throwing them out
into the public sounds like a really bad idea. But I got out of
that relationship in 2017, and when I did,
words started pouring out of me. And so I started writing
manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. And if we go back
to the turn of the century, as I collect the call, the
2000s, the.
You started, right? And I romanticize about that period of the
Internet. To me, it was the Wild West. You're right, people were just publishing
anything, and it was chaotic, but it was beautiful. It was
new mediums and new ways to be creative online.
And you're right, some of the content was atrocious.
Did you have any. Did you tend to
lean towards a certain type of business or were you
freelancing for all kinds of businesses or did you have kind of a niche?
I actually did it for a lot of different businesses, but I soon found
myself doing quite a bit in the real estate space. There were a lot
of real estate agents, and real estate agents were also looking
for other writing they would want a little ebook on
10 things you should know before buying a house for the first time and that
kind of thing. So I liked working with real estate agents because it gave me
the opportunity to expand with them a little bit. And I had
several clients that had me write multiple
little manuals and ebooks and things
for their clients, which was great because it means I wasn't constantly
scrambling for another client. You know, when you have a very small
business and you write their website content, most of the time they
were done. They weren't writing blogs, they weren't doing anything else. They just needed that
one. So it was a one and done. And so real Estate agents were often
really good for me. And is that how you came up with maybe. Is
that one of your early publications, the 301 simple things
you can do to sell your house now is. Is. Did that come from
taking these freelance jobs writing? It actually, it actually did.
There was a little publishing company in Florida that reached
out to me and said, hey, we had an author that was going to write
a book on it
was real estate investing. And I said, look, I don't
know anything about investing. They said, we can give you all the research. We need
someone who can write it. And so I wrote it and
I was super excited to have my name on it, but that's really all it
was. It was never my book. I mean, it was, my name's on it,
but I didn't get any royalties or anything like that. And I did a couple
of more books with them that were in the real estate space as well, and
that really helped. And then that was actually really good advertising
for when I would go back to small businesses. You know, it would be like,
oh yeah, I have. I have books in this space. And then they would want
me to write their information. So that's kind of where it got started.
But that's where the bug hit me the first time that I had
my name in print. Because when you're writing
for websites, your name doesn't get in print. If you look on other people's websites,
it doesn't say in the bottom written by. But the first time that I wrote
a book and this real estate investing book came back to me and
it was like, oh my gosh, there's my name. And there's just something about
seeing your name on a book that is very exciting. I know it's
very early days and before social media, but in
all those writings, did you have anything that was kind of a viral moment or.
Or people recognize the you from the book or
any kind of interactions? I didn't have it then, although it's really
funny you should say that. Today I had a very little, small thing. I
was at a local, one of these art
artists mart's markets, right? And I was, oh, it was hot.
I live on the coast of North Carolina and it was just brutal today. And
I was out there and this young teenager,
probably, probably not driving yet, ran up to me all
excited and said, oh my gosh, my mom has read all your books and they
live in another state. My mom has read all of your books. Can I get
a picture of you? And it was like, yeah,
so no, it didn't happen then, but it's happened a couple of times now. And
let me tell you, I could have packed up my things and gone home. It
was like, okay, my day's made. This is perfect, you know. So
as you're writing this content for Internet, are you finding more and
more passion towards writing or are you elaborating on these real
estate spaces and creating worlds in your mind? I mean,
I was to an extent, but there was that piece of me that was
really closed up. You know, I'm living in this emotionally abusive space and
there's, there, there's just a real fear of
letting me out on a page. And so I kind of kept it
all inside, but boy, did I want it. I just, I had
several people that I knew that, that were writing something, you
know, and I would reach out and talk to them and I kept thinking, I'm
going to do this. I'm going to do this. I got out of that relationship
and immediately went on this one week writers retreat
and in one week I wrote a 50,000 word manuscript.
It just, it just like fell right out of me. Now. It was no good.
It will never, that one will never see the light of day. It was, it
was not good, but it taught me so much. It made me realize,
first of all I had 50,000 words in me and that they were made up.
It wasn't like with, with nonfiction.
You kind of know what you're going to write. You know, there's 10 steps. You
figure out the 10 steps. You write the 10 steps with a, with a novel,
it's way more in your head or you have to come up with, where is
this story going? So it had a beginning, a middle and end. It had
characters. It just, it'd be like looking at maybe
Picasso's first painting, right? It, it probably wasn't very good. He's still
figuring out how to hold the brush and mix the paints. And so that's the
way I feel is it taught me that I could do it.
And then I had to figure out exactly how that would look. Yeah. So that,
that retreat, did that really ignite the spark then? Is that when you're like,
you came back and you're like, I'm a writer. Well, no, you know, that's. Now
that's funny. No, I came back and wanted to be a writer, but
talk about terrible imposter syndrome. I mean, I
was sure that I was no good. You have to remember Now, I'd spent 14
years in this abusive relationship. And just because you're out of it
doesn't mean you're healed. I was still a basket full of
anxiety and doubts and didn't believe in myself. And
it's crazy. I met my what. Who became my
husband, and he, he just kept telling
me, oh, I love what you write and everything else. But I thought, yeah, of
course that's what you're going to say. What else would you say to me? I
mean, that would be. Be horrible if you said anything else.
But he had been wanting to ride a bicycle across the United
States. That was something on his bucket list. He saw a group of kids do
it in 1976 for the bicentennial, and he would have
dropped everything to go do it, except he was in the military, and it's not
like they were going to give him three months off to go on this random
adventure. So as we're dating, he brings this up to
me. Well, I had been saying to myself that I wanted to do something
big and bold, huge that would prove to people that I
still had value and worth. Well, I, I, no one else
doubted it. It was just me doubting it. But, you know, I didn't know that
at the time. And so I just asked him, is this something you're going to
talk about until the day you die, or are you going to do it? He
said, no, I really want to do it. I said, count me in. I mean,
we weren't married. I had no intention of ever getting married again, but I
thought I'd go on this adventure. And what's really crazy is I hadn't been on
a bicycle in 40 years at that point. So this
was really huge and really outside my comfort zone.
And let's back up. This isn't just a normal bicycle. No, it's a tandem.
It's a tandem bicycle. So you're going cross country on a tandem bicycle? On a
tandem bicycle. And really, for us, that was the best thing.
My husband was an avid cycler
and had been since middle school. And by avid, I mean he
did racing and he did, he did all of this. And, and then
there was me. And I hadn't been on a bicycle in 40 years. There's no
way that I'm going to be able to catch up to his ability.
And so if we had been on separate bikes, it wouldn't have been any fun
for me. He would have always been two days ahead of me. I would have
never caught up with him. It would have been horrible. But on a tandem bicycle,
he can't go faster than me, and I can't Go slower than him. You
know, we have to work together and we have to figure out how that works.
And what's really great is we were gone for three months, a little over three
months. And it feels like we got
about 20 years worth of marriage experience in those three
months because we did everything together. We were never
apart. We slept in a little tent together. We. We
pedaled together. We cooked all our meals together. We did absolutely everything
together. So we say that in tandem time. We've been married 20 years
longer than we are in Earth time. Did you have to either carry all
your supplies or did somebody follow with you or. No, no, no. We were, we
were by ourselves. We had, we had panniers, which
backpacks for the tires front and back. And then
we had a kids trailer with no children in it. And that's where we put
our tent and other supplies like that. And off we went.
And the crazy thing is, is this was the summer of 2020. So. Covid.
Summer. Mid. Mid Covid. We're going on. We're going across country.
Yeah. And. And we did. And we left Astoria, Oregon and rode
3102 miles to Washington, DC. You
started the home of the Goonies. Yeah,
it was a crazy, crazy adventure. But it was after
that ride that I became a writer
because. Go ahead. Little rules for a double butted adventure.
Right. And I've never heard a tandem bike called double butted. I want to
refer to my bicycle now as single butted. Is single butted adventure. Is that
proper term? Can I. Sure, sure. Why not? You know, it's funny, when
we were riding across the United States, I kept a blog and I kept it
every day and I told every little detail that you could know. So
what was the temperature? How many miles did we go? Did we have any flat
tires? How many mosquitoes did we. Did we run into? And
so I had the whole thing laid out
and I called it Double Butted Adventures. And it's crazy.
In my book, I talk about this. I came up with it as kind of
a play on words. Double butted. Right. And my husband, who's
an engineer and not as
creative, I mean, he's. He's creative in his own way, but not in that
way, said, oh, double. But it's like double butted steel, the
kind of steel they use to put together a tandem bicycle.
And I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about. So it turns out
that it fit both of us beautifully. Me for my creative,
you know, and then him for, you know, this is a technical term for the
way they do steel tubing in order to make it
strong, even though it's long and. Thin and going
3,000 miles across the country. How many flat tires did you
end up having? Did you keep track of that stat? Yeah, I don't know.
I know there was one day where we had three. Three in one day.
It was horrible. That was the day we were going to quit. I was going
to quit. I was. I was done. I was ready to call it off,
you know, it was a horribly long, hot day with the
wind blowing the wrong way and three flat tires, and I was just done.
But we made it. So it's not like you could just
doordash from your local bicycle shop, like. So let's say
you're on the road. You had to carry those supplies as well, too. Those were
all with you? Yeah, we had several different tubes and. And patch
kits and chain repair stuff, and. And
my husband is one of those people that he's always
prepared, and then he has a plan for his plan. And
so every screw that could fall off on a
bicycle, he had in a baggie. Yeah. And he just.
He just would fix things on the side of the road. I wouldn't have been
able to do this trip without him because I don't know enough about bicycle
mechanics. If I was going to do a trip like that, I would have had
to have gone in a group where they had the wagon that came up
behind you and could help you if you had had problems or whatever.
Yeah, I would need room service as well. That would have
been nice. On several occasions, I could tell you. Did you stay mostly
in northern part of the country, or was there a part that you
really reflect back on? Like that part of the country
I really found myself. I found clarity.
Was there a part of the country that just resonated with you? Yeah, I found
clarity all along the way. But I think that one of the places that
really sticks out to me is Lolo Pass, and that is in
Idaho. And you go over the Rocky Mountains and then down into Montana,
and it was three days of up as we're crossing
the Rockies. And it was beautiful. I have so many pictures of
that period of time. We would go around a corner and I would say, oh,
you have to stop and let me get a picture. This is the most beautiful
thing I've ever seen. And, you know, 400 yards later,
oh, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And so he. He got
to the point, I'd go, oh, and he'd say, I know we need to stop.
And he was very good about that, letting
me see this. And I think getting over the Rockies, it
was something that had been terrifying to me. I
didn't. I couldn't imagine how I was going to be able to
manage to do that. And so once we got over the Rockies, from
that point on, although we hit many difficult things after that,
I think I believed a little more that I could do it because I had
made it over the Rocky Mountains. Was there kind of a sell. Did you kind
of know the halfway point, or do you have markers along the way that were
these goals you wanted to achieve? I tried not to do
that because you almost have to ride
every day as its own thing. In fact, when we were finished,
it was very hard to imagine that we had made it the whole way across,
because instead of riding, we rode for 72
riding days, and we were gone for over 90 days, because some days you have
to take breaks. And I told people I
didn't really ride 72 days. I rode one day
72 times, if that makes any sense. And it was
really hard. It was like I knew I did it. I had pictures. I have,
you know, memories of all the different places along the way, but
I couldn't seem to add it all up where all of a sudden,
here we are. And when we got to Washington, D.C. that was kind
of the. My big aha moment. And
we were. We were coming into D.C. we were stopping at the Marine Corps
Memorial. My husband was a Marine, and we were raising money for Toys
for Tots. So it seemed like a wonderful place to stop. And he said,
do you see that flag? I said, yes. He said, that's it. That's where we're
stopping. And I started to laugh and cry at the same time. I was just
a big emotional mess. And I thought, I did it.
I rode all the way across the United States. I can do anything I put
my mind to. It's not a matter of, can I do it? It's a matter
of what do I want to do. And I thought, I want to be an
author. And 14 months later, my first novel came out.
That's got to be the most incredible feeling, like I'm invincible.
I did something like 200, 300 people
may have done in their whole. I don't even know how many people have done
that. I have no idea. But I just know that it's not many. And now
when I go to these, you know, have you ever been at a party where
they say, you know, Come up with one thing you think you've done that no
one else has ever done. It's like I don't even have to think anymore. Yeah.
What's the likelihood I'm going to run into another person that rode across the United
States on a tandem bicycle? It's pretty slim. And so, yeah, yeah.
Even lowers the people, right? People on bicycles.
But even that's not in the. It's not an everyday. It's not an
everyday thing. But. But a tandem is really very. A very
unusual thing. And that also led to. I believe you
started creating a children's series. A children's book is. Just came out in the
last couple months. And did that kind of get unlocked during this trip?
Yes, it actually did. When you're sitting on the. So I was on the back
of the tandem, which makes the most sense. My husband was a,
like I said, a lifelong cyclist. And you would want someone like that
on the front. You know, he knows what to look for. And with the traffic,
he knows. He just knows more. So I'm on the back and I'm doing the
grunt work, you know, and I'm pedaling. But it gave me a lot of time
to kind of look around and think. And we were along
Highway 2 for. All the way across
Montana, all the way across North Dakota.
We just kept going. And along that highway is a
train, you know, train line. And after a while,
those engineers knew us because they would go one way and they'd come back the
other and they would beep and wave. You know, it was like. Yeah. Really? They'd
wave at us and they got to know us. And my mind started going
around about trains and different kinds of trains. And this idea came
to me, which is my book. It's called Little Lola In Her Big Dream.
And Lola wants to be a. An astronaut train.
And all of her friends laugh at her and say, there's no such thing. So
she goes and talks with some trains about things that they were.
So the kids can learn about other trains. But in the end, she
decides that she's going to hold on to her dream. And the really cool
thing is, as soon as I finished writing the book, I had it written.
My illustrations were on the way. There was an
article from NASA that came out, and they're going. They're planning to put a
train on the moon because they want to put the space
station on the moon, and they need to be able to get from the dark
side to the light side of the moon. And so they're going to put a
Train. And so my author note tells the children, you know,
when I started writing this book, Lola couldn't have been a space train, but now
she can be. That's why you need to keep your dreams. So. And
that just came out this year. Came out in April. Yeah. Yeah.
Amazing. And a part of supporting all this. Now you went to
school completely different. Study, not writing, you've
written some books, and now you have a podcast as well
that's online for authors. Tell us a little bit about
that or what's coming from this podcast that
you're putting out into the world. So online for authors
was kind of an idea of mine when I started
realizing that I needed to do marketing. You know, you get out there, you write
your book, you think it's going to sell itself. It does not. You figure out
very quickly you need to determine what to do for marketing. I started
becoming a guest on podcasts, and I loved it. I love this back
and forth and the ability to chat. And what I
noted, though, was, is when I talked with podcast hosts that had
read the book, I had very different kinds of questions than if
I talked with podcast guests who only read, like, the back cover.
And often they would ask me questions that were like, didn't relate to
me at all. And I had to figure out, how do I answer that? And
I thought, wouldn't it be great if there was a
podcast out there that they read the book first? So that's what I do.
It's called online for authors, and authors
send me their book. I read it. If I feel like it's a good fit
for my audience, I bring them on the show. So I'm reading
about 75 books a year now, and I have people
come on and we chat about their book without giving away the
endings so that people can kind of get a feel for. For what this book
is like. It would be like going to a book club, but only staying for
the first little bit of it where we're only talking about the beginning of the
book, and then. And then you have to go and read the rest. You try
to get out some behind the scenes. Yeah, I
do. And like, I've done quite a few of people
who are doing memoir, which I also really enjoy reading. And so I'll.
I'll say things like, can you tell me a story that you wanted to put
in but you had to cut because of what reason? And so we get those
kinds of things and we talk about things like
when you write, you can either be a real planner, and they call those
Plotters. Or you can be someone who writes by the seat of their pants,
which is a pantser. And that's what I am. And so I asked that
question, you know, which are you and why? And those kinds of questions. So it's
a lot of fun. You've got the books, you've got the podcast.
Any, any direction that you see yourself taking this. Do you
want to do more public speaking or meet and greets or conventions?
What do you have on the schedule for the rest of the year? Yeah, I
really, really want to do motivational speaking, especially now that my
10 little rules for double budded adventure is out. Those are 10 rules.
They're not really about the cycling ride
as much as they are about life lessons that I learned, things
that help me live a more adventurous life. And each one
of those rules could easily be a talk, like in
corporate America or something. I could do that. I'm really looking
for a way to start doing kind of talking.
What's coming up this year? I've got 26
day residency that I'm going to in August, so I'll be gone the
whole month of August writing. And I have another residency the end of October
and I'll be writing, which I'm really excited about. I
have a lot of one day events
where I'm going to be selling my books and quite a few book clubs and
all of that. But I'd really love to find myself speaking
either to corporate America or universities. I think would
be a great, great place for me to go and talk with, you know, college
kids who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their, their
life. Well, if people want to connect with you, they
want to hear the podcast or reach out or send you their book to be
a potential guest on your podcast. What's the best way to find you and
to find the podcast? Yeah, the best way is to go to my website, which
is my name, terimbrown.com and that's Teri with one
R on the website. You can find
my podcast here, you can find all my books, you can sign up for my
newsletter, you can see all my social media and I even just have a,
you know, a reach out to me form that you can fill out and send
to me and I try to get back with everybody that reaches out to me.
Teri, this has been so much fun. You took us on quite the journey
going across the country. Started in Greece and a couple books, a
podcast. Let's hear that theme song.
She pedaled coast to coast Chasing
dreams and finding light from
heartbreak to healing under
stars and morning light
with tales of fiction, truth, and flight.
It's D. Brown on
my guest tonight.
Double boy adventure. A
journey so real. Jeff reveals
the host with a mic and
some zeal. Tune in
now, don't miss the ride.
On my guest and I let the
stories collide.
Backstage dancing. It's funny. Like, you create the songs based off the
notes that I have, and. And then we have the discussion and it's.
There's a lot of foreshadowing in that song about what we talked about.
Absolutely. That is so crazy, that song. I'm going to be
grinning for days over that. That is fabulous. That is so. Do
you have A.I. that does that?