#153 A Motorcycle, a Manuscript, and a Story of Freedom

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode # 153 Carla King

“A Motorcycle, a Manuscript, and a Story of Freedom”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing and I’m here with my friend Carla King and you’re going to learn lots about— if you’re an author—how to navigate a journey to getting published and having a book myself, I know it’s a rocky road, but with somebody who can guide you, it’s easier. So hello, Carla. I’ll introduce you in just a minute, but I just wanted to say hello. 

(00:27) Carla King: Hi, Doreen. Great to be here. 

(00:29) Doreen Downing: I’m going to read the bio you sent. Carla King is an author and publishing expert who’s passionate about guiding writers through the journey of turning their stories into polished, professional books. She is known for her adventurous solo motorcycle travels and as a pioneer in online travel blogging.

Carla brings creativity and clear actionable advice to her coaching through her books, workshops, and the Your Publishing Compass Year-Long Program. She helps authors confidently navigate the publishing process and share their stories with the world and why I’m so excited today, Carla, is because I know in just a few weeks, and this will be published before then that will be supporting you and getting this year-long program together and on the books and people enrolled. Yes. 

(01:31) Carla King: Yes. Thank you. Yes. It’s a big program. It’s year-long and it’s the first that I’ve done. It’s a road to get to know my authors and shepherd them through finding, not only their writing voice, but their book publishing presence in the world. 

(01:48) Doreen Downing: Yes. Also, I would say, and maybe there’s a way in which you’ll work with me, but around the voice, like lots of people publish, but then they have to do interviews, they have to go to bookstore events, there’s ways in which people go, I found my voice, but I can’t speak up. 

(02:11) Carla King: Exactly. I resonate with that because I’m just a born introvert, and it took me until after my writing was published to even start speaking confidently, even to reading my own words and not even performing or do any extemporaneous speaking in front of people, so it terrified me. 

(02:36) Doreen Downing: Oh, I’m so glad that you understand my situation, and those of the listeners, I’m sure, who have a book that they want to write, but also some of them are scared because they know that they’ll have to do more than just write it.

This is great. I really look forward to our conversation today, but first, and you know my podcast, that I always like to ask about your early history, because you’re talking about, yes, having introversion as a way of being in this world, but also that we grow from a family, so I always get curious about, well, did that family support you? Did it not? Did you have a voice? It could go all day. We could be talking a long time here, but just give us any insights and stories, anything that comes up about early, early history for you and voice. 

(03:32) Carla King: Yes. Well, my parents were opposites. My mom, an introvert and an artist, and my dad, an extrovert, engineer, a mechanic from the south. My mom was from the north and so it was—we’re not going to say green acres sort of thing, but there was a lot of variety and a lot of different values, a lot of different ways of being coming at me all the time. 

We lived in North Carolina. We moved to an isolated farming area in tobacco land, North Carolina, and I was alone a lot, and my mom had floor to ceiling bookshelves, and I loved reading. We also had acreage with vehicles with rabbits and chickens and a big farm to deal with, so I would help my dad do the mechanical things. I’m the oldest of four, which is how I got my expertise in engine repair. Surprise. 

So, we were outsiders. We didn’t go to church. It was very Southern Baptist. I wasn’t participating in that activity with my peers, and I think, because I was such an introvert, I actually liked being alone, and I liked just having a couple of friends instead of big, loud groups. That made me nervous. 

(05:01) Doreen Downing: Yes. Early on, partly where we find our voice is in family, but also in groups. And I’m hearing that there was a way in which the inner life was really rich for you.

(05:16) Carla King: Yes, it was an inner life and it was very analytical. Now, I have a big family on my dad’s side—18 cousins—and so, that was very enriching, but it was also pretty exhausting. What fed me, and what has always fed me, is making sense of the world via my observations. I’m very much in the background. I have been, of course, in front of the mic a lot now. What do they call it? Extroverted introvert. I don’t know. I just learned it later.

I loved figuring— I still love figuring things out. I’m a traveler. I’m a motorcycle traveler for the most part. I love taking off on a motorcycle in weird places and remote places in the world and seeing how other people live, observing, trying to absorb every aspect of their life.

I don’t know where that came from. I think I was just born that way. Nature versus nurture. Even though I did have some external input of being a bit isolated, I was very happy that way. 

(06:25) Doreen Downing: Well, getting to know you today, I feel some sparks because I was in the Peace Corps and that’s where I first got the travel bug, and I would say, that’s where I also had my first motorcycle. 

(06:38) Carla King: Yay. Oh, great. Have one of those little Hondas and zip around. 

(06:42) Doreen Downing: A Honda 350. 

(06:45) Carla King: Yes, I knew it. 

(06:47) Doreen Downing: I was in Malaysia. I would say that curiosity, I share that with you too. The way that I bring it to the podcast too is, wow, Carla, you’re a puzzle to me. In my psychology work, that’s what I loved. That figuring out, that exploration of who the person is, what makes them tick. 

That’s what today is a little bit about: who is Carla and what happened and how is she influenced? What did she come into this world with naturally, which makes you, I think, one of your gifts. We’ll talk about that later, how that relates to you being such a good guide when it comes to going through a complicated journey, a complicated process of book writing and book publishing. 

(07:37) Carla King: It is a journey. Wow. It’s a journey. And yes, I think people love books. Readers love books because they do have a curiosity of how the world works and what your observations are like, what is it like to be you, Doreen? And I can only get to that if you write a nonfiction book or a fiction book about your experiences or about your imagined experiences, about characters you’re developing, right?

It’s just fascinating. I think that when authors succeed, they’re really tapping into the reader’s curiosity about how somebody else works their stuff out and their adventures and their tragedies. 

(08:16) Doreen Downing: Well, you must have had to work some stuff out. Let’s hear some story about finding your voice and working some stuff out. Anything. 

(08:27) Carla King: Yes, well, when I was 16, my father, who also worked at IBM, moved us from rural North Carolina to San Jose, California, which was just experiencing becoming Silicon Valley. It still had prune orchards everywhere in tractors on Highway 101, but all of a sudden there were all of these IBM people from various parts of the country and even in the world, in the suburbs in San Jose. 

Many of the adults, the adults that I baby-sitted for in my neighborhood were going through a little bit of a late wild 1960s, 70s era. The psychedelics, the drugs, the crazy S stuff, and experimenting with open marriages. I was seeing that as a 16 year old in the middle of this, and it was nuts. 

Part of the journey was I was a very late bloomer, so when I was 15 and a half, I was still flat-chested. I still had pimples. I had braces. I was taller than everybody else. I was very quiet and I was always off in the corner. When I was 15 and three quarters, we planned to move to San Jose, and by the time I got there, everything changed. 

I got breasts. I got my braces off. I started like skin cleared up and I was suddenly this cute blonde and I got male attention and it was freaking me out. I not only got male attention, but I got female attention. Like the pretty girls wanted to be my friends now where they used to ignore me in North Carolina, so I actually had a reinvention, but I never felt comfortable. I was always friends with all the groups. I wasn’t in any clique. 

(10:18) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(10:20) Carla King: I would cut school and go over to Santa Cruz with the surfers. I would go to a party with the stoners. I would go to a football game with the jocks and that made me happy. I don’t know what you have to say about that, but I think that’s the heart of a researcher and the heart of a writer and an observer and a journalist, all of which I became later.

(10:38) Doreen Downing: Oh, yes, it perfectly fits into the characterizations and being able to enter into a world, understand it from the inside out, I feel like I have to say it again. I feel like you’re my mirror. I mean, I had cousins that were in jail and addicts, and I also was living right outside of Stanford University in a very elite and in a different environment, you might say. So, that whole range of being able to have friends across the board and be accepted— 

(11:15) Carla King: Is that a nature or a nurture thing? I think it just has to be both. But I still couldn’t find my speaking voice, like I was still very quiet and very go-along. I had my boundaries, but not speaking out about what I thought.

I think a lot of that is because I didn’t know what to think, and I do tell people that as a writer, and I’ve had other authors and writers tell me that they share this feeling that you get some new information, and some people are just like, “I like that. I’m embracing that. That’s okay or that’s not okay. I like it because of this,” and it comes out of their head and they can have an opinion. 

I have to sit on it. I have to journal about it. I changed my mind three times and I feel like I can very easily see many sides and I almost never can really decide what I think. Almost never because I know it’s going to be different when I get more information. Does that resonate with you too? 

(12:21) Doreen Downing: Yes, and also bringing it back to voice is, well, what is your true voice?

(12:27) Carla King: Yes, and what is it? What happens when you say, “I don’t know?” I mean, my voice is a voice of possible questioning. Always being —maybe it might be a good thing— open to other’s ideas, or at least there are a lot of ideas that I’m not at all open to, but I’m also very interested and curious about why they have those ideas that I’m not accepting. 

It’s funny in books, if you’re a reader or if you’re a writer, it’s fun as a writer to have characters. I’m not good at fiction. I’ve tried fiction and I’d love to write it, but I so admire the fiction authors who can have characters arguing and in conflict and really sure about what they’re saying and coming to a head and having this climactic make up or break up and doing the thing that they do in the hero’s journey.

(13:19) Doreen Downing: The hero’s journey. Well, I’m going to take a break and I’m going to come back and talk about the hero’s journey because you’re a hero or she-ro, and we want to talk about your journey. We’ll be right back.

Hi, we’re back with my friend Carla King talking about voice and curiosity and introversion. It seems like some of these topics are how it comes out as somebody who’s a writer, or if you have a book that you’re thinking about writing and want to publish, what is that journey? 

Carla is somebody who is a trusted advisor, a trusted guide that can do that. What I’m doing today is introducing you to Carla so that you know more about her history. That’s part of learning to trust a guide is that they’ve been either where you are or where you were and have traveled. So that’s what we’re coming back to. You mentioned a journey, a hero’s journey. So, Carla, what would you say is your hero’s journey? 

(14:25) Carla King: Goodness. Well, it started with getting married and making plans with my husband. I got married at 24 to an engineer that I worked with. I was a technical writer. In Silicon Valley, because my father was an engineer and I actually used to correct his memos—he was a terrible speller —starting when I was about 12 years old.

Because we did mechanical things together, I learned how things got put together, and that was perfect for the hardware-centric, Silicon Valley mainframe computer stuff going on in Silicon Valley at the time. So, I started out at Fairchild writing mainframe computer manuals, and I met my husband and we did a lot of motorcycle traveling together around the Bay Area and California, and we got married and he stopped wanting to travel. 

We had planned to go to Europe and there were no motorcycle rental places back then. I had to find some guy who would let us borrow and pay for 2 motorcycles and he kept delaying it all the time, so finally, I just got really mad and I said, “I’m going and you can just meet me if you make your own arrangements and meet me somewhere if you’re going to go,” and I got on that airplane to Milan. I had arranged to pick up the motorcycles in Milan and the guy brought the 1 motorcycle. I got on the plane and I was like, what am I doing because I had always tried to get my friends to go with me to Europe.

I don’t know why I didn’t think I could go by myself. And this was the thing. I just got so angry that I did it. I got on that motorcycle and instead of really traveling through Italy, which was his heritage, and he wanted to explore that. I just turned right at the Mediterranean ocean and went to France, which is more my interest. It was a six week journey, so it was quite a while. 

I spent about a week, I don’t know, four or five, six days really sulking and camping in some of the most beautiful places in the world. Until I got to this campground where there were wonderful families from Germany and Italy and Eastern Europe and a guy from England going to Greece and they were all having a party and they invited me and we had a barbecue together and then this guy on a bicycle rides in and he is just adorable.

It was like the deal was sealed. My marriage was over. I had this wild affair with this guy. He got on the back of my motorcycle. We found a place to store his bicycle, and we rode through France for a couple of weeks before I dropped him off to get the bicycle again. 

That was a real decision to end my marriage, which I had known for a while that was not serving me well and neither him either because we had promised each other we didn’t want children and he started to want children and I knew that wasn’t for me, so that led to one of my first stories that I ever wrote and it was called, Trading a Husband for Freedom in the South of France.

(17:46) Doreen Downing: Oh, Carla, this is fabulous. I’ve just got so many tickles on my skin because what you’re telling us today is so real and so powerful moments. I mean, you did know something needed to change, but you didn’t act on it at first, but then you acted and then the world opened up for you. Wow. 

(18:07) Carla King: So much. I learned to make those hard decisions. What I was doing was going along with the marriage because that’s what my parents had done. I didn’t know anybody who was divorced. That’s what my friends were doing. People were pressuring me to have children. And I just went, Boom, it’s not happening. 

I didn’t even really say it to myself. It only came out in writing because it was such a shocking powerful story. I got incredible input and positive input on it. I thought I was going to get blasted because you don’t know until you really write the hard things, what’s going to happen and it’s interesting. What I have found since then is the harder it is to write, the more painful, the more shocking, the badder you think you are, the more it resonates with people because they do not feel as alone as they did when they read what you went through. So, putting your heart and pain on the page is very important. 

(19:12) Doreen Downing: Oh, I really hear you. Thank you. Yes. I really, really get— and I just felt like it came through today to the listeners about the power of deep truth and that voice to me is what I heard you say. 

So, let’s move now towards more about thank you for sharing that moment and that journey and that story and that profound message, and I know that you’ve got a year-long program coming up and that I think people now go, “Wow, let me get close to Carla to have her help me find my pain and be able to write about it in such a way that it’s compelling and reaches other people with my story.” 

Let’s talk more about what you’re doing nowadays and how people can find you. Just anything more about you now that you feel like you are lined up with who you are and what you know is true about people finding their voice. 

(20:15) Carla King: Yes, and what I know is true is that it is hard for people to put their heart on the page and I think that’s why one of the reasons it’s hard for them to finish their manuscript is because it’s never good enough, but when it’s not finished, it’s still this perfect thing that could be amazing and wonderful. 

I know a lot of authors who have had a book for years and years and years and they’re very reluctant to publish because it’s not ready yet. Well, it can be ready very easily, and today we’ve got AI tools to play with, to pull out scenes and make things a lot easier for authors to analyze their story.

Linda Joy Myers and I are teaching memoir together too, and we’ve been experimenting with our authors to use AI to analyze and make their stories, that complete product that can be published. Then the publishing aspect of it, it’s simple, but there are a lot of steps. 

So, normally I’ve taken people through it, either on a consulting basis, which is very expensive, or in group coaching and lessons, which is an intensive six weeks, which is way too short because you get a lot of information and then you get a headache and then you put it aside for a while. I’ve seen authors do this. 

So, what I’ve done is I’ve created my same ideas and enriched my publishing program that includes the marketing on one end and the promotion on the other, because you really can’t separate those tasks. It’s marketing, publishing, and promotion. 

It’s so much more fun to do that when you’re not quite finished with your book because you’re also wanting to test your book with beta readers and make sure that the stories are resonating as you want and make sure that your book belongs in the genre that you think it belongs in.

So, we work together on doing all the right research and the outreach, and that takes— it’s every other week for 12 weeks and between those are as a group coaching program, so I can keep people motivated and answer questions, and then every two weeks throughout 2025. 

I think this is going to be a great model because what’s happened before is I teach a class and they’re on their own. I really want to see people, more of my students, who have these amazing books who I want to see get out into the world actually make it out into the world and experience that joy and satisfaction there is in not just being an author, but having really— yes, being an author, but getting their ideas and their creation, their art, their craft, their ecosystem of what they believe and what they want to communicate to others out into the world, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

(23:21) Doreen Downing: Well, I like that you said that it isn’t just about somebody going off and being a writer and doing the writing and then thinking about, well, where am I going to promote it and where I’m going to really read it. I love the integration of marketing. So, that’s one thing that I think people can get from you as they are thinking about moving forward in being a published author. 

How do people find you? I know I’ll have show notes but if you could just say it out loud for people who are listening. 

(23:57) Carla King: Sure. You can find me by going to CarlaKing.com, That’s Carla with a C, or googling, you’ll find my books, my nonfiction books on publishing, and my adventure travel memoirs there, along with all my courses and workshops and consulting programs.

(24:16) Doreen Downing: I would say that it seems like writing is an adventure, and that’s how I think you bring both of your gifts together, is that you are a spirited adventurer. 

(24:28) Carla King: Thank you. I know I have this practical tech writing side that loves to publish books, but I also have the adventure who wants to get curious and write all those juicy stories about the solo travels. It’s a fun mix. I have to say I really, really love what my life has become. 

(24:48) Doreen Downing: I can tell you’re just beaming. I’m going to end now, but I always like to, before I do, just give people, give you an opportunity, just reflect on what you might want to leave in terms of a message or what needs to be. What are you listening inside of yourself that you feel wants to be said out loud to my listeners?

(25:16) Carla King: I know that there’s a lot of fear around putting your own thoughts and opinions out into the world, especially if —and this is true for every author, that somebody’s going to disagree with you and give you a bad review on Amazon. That’s just the way it’s going to be. So, I love for you just to write your heart, write for the readers that you want to connect with, and finish it and give them the gift of your book.

(25:47) Doreen Downing: I love that last line. Give the gift of your book. That’s a good marketing line, I think. So Carla, thank you so, so, so much. 

(25:57) Carla King: Thank you, Doreen. It’s been lovely to talk with you, as always. 

(26:01) Doreen Downing: Wonderful.