A Tacoma Author Mines Silver and the Web

About a year and a half ago I started meeting with a fellowship of writers who were looking to support each other in maintaining the habit of putting words to the page. This small band, (we recently added another to the group), included Mary Lloyd, who had an idea and a passion to inspire those who might be looking at retirement, and to encourage them to use that as a springboard to fulfilling goals and dreams.

That idea became more of a movement in her assessment and she supported this with a book that she began assembling chapters for. Like all great projects, much of the thrill that I as a spectator had was in watching her create the whole from the parts. She poked and prodded and reworked her ideas and spent a great deal of time and energy determining how to solidify and distribute them. Should she get an agent, a publisher, start a blog, build a web site or all of them?

Like many creative people, she understood that technology could benefit in her success, but she was not familiar enough with how to go about utilizing it. Questions such as how to go about getting a domain name and how to use it came up. “What was available?”, “What was for sale?”, “Where would you host it?” and “How could it be leveraged for her purposes?” were all important questions that she now had to tackle.

The result of her efforts has come to fruition and the South Sound has another author in its midst. Her book, Bold Retirement: Mining Your Own Silver for a Rich Life will be available November 1st of this year.

Her web site is up and running, thanks to the direction and efforts of The Gurus and David Printz. Online commerce has been made possible by Google Checkout, and Mary is now able to let the global community know that

"These are 'the silver years.' They come before 'the golden years' and are characterized by action, direction, and passion.".

This is another fine example of the arts technology ecosystem at work.

UPDATE:
Mary mentions that she would like to give kudos to Adam Welch, who did the graphic design and Warren McQuistion who did the site development and architecture.