Today I am very pleased to welcome author Jamie Baywood to the blog with a guest post. Jamie is the author of Getting Rooted in New Zealand.
Guest post by Jamie Baywood
It was always my dream to
live abroad when I was growing up in California. I had bad dating
experiences in California and read in a New Zealand tour book that the
country’s population has 100,000 fewer men than women. I wanted to have
some me time and an adventure. New Zealand seemed like a good place to do so.
Although I intended to have a solo adventure I ended up meeting my husband a
Scottish man in New Zealand.
I consider myself an accidental author. I didn’t go to New
Zealand with the intentions of writing a book about my experiences there. I had
funny experiences that I had trouble believing were true. I wrote the stories
down to stay sane. I wrote situations down that were happening around me and
shared them with friends. The stories made people laugh so I decided to
organize the stories into a book and publish in the hope of making others laugh
too.
One of
the first people I met was Colin Mathura-Jeffree from New Zealand’s Next Top
Model. I had no idea who he was or that he was on TV when I meet him. He is
friends with my former flatmate. We had a steep staircase that I kept falling
down. Colin taught me to walk like a model so I wouldn’t fall down the stairs.
In New
Zealand, I had a lot of culture shock. One of the most memorable moments
was learning the meaning of the Kiwi slang word “rooted.” One night I was
brushing my teeth with my flatmate and I said, ‘I’m really excited to live in
this house because I have been travelling a lot and I just need to settle down,
stop traveling and get rooted’. He was choking on his toothbrush and asked me
if I knew what that meant because it had a completely different meaning in New
Zealand than it does in the States.
I had the
opportunity to write and perform for Thomas Sainsbury, the most prolific
playwright in New Zealand. I performed a monologue about my jobs in the
Basement Theatre in Auckland. The funny
thing about that experience was Tom kept me separated from the other performers
until it was time to perform. I was under the impression that all the performers
were foreigners giving their experiences in New Zealand. All of the other performers were professional
actors telling stories that weren’t their own. At first I was mortified, but
the audience seemed to enjoy my “performance,” laughing their way through my
monologue. After the shows we would go out and mingle with the audience. People
would ask me how long I had been acting. I would tell them, “I wasn’t acting; I
have to go to work tomorrow and sit next to the girl wearing her dead dog’s
collar around her neck.”
I love making people laugh more than anything else. I feel
very grateful when readers understand my sense of humour. I plan to divide my
books by the countries I’ve lived in. My next book will be about attempting to
settle in Scotland.
Getting Rooted in New Zealand book description:
Craving change and lacking logic, at 26,
Jamie, a cute and quirky Californian, impulsively moves to New Zealand to avoid
dating after reading that the country's population has 100,000 fewer men. In
her journal, she captures a hysterically honest look at herself, her past and
her new wonderfully weird world filled with curious characters and slapstick
situations in unbelievably bizarre jobs. It takes a zany jaunt to the end of
the Earth and a serendipitous meeting with a fellow traveler before Jamie
learns what it really means to get rooted.
About the author Jamie Baywood:
Jamie Baywood grew up in Petaluma,
California. In 2010, she made the most impulsive decision of her life by moving
to New Zealand. Getting Rooted in New Zealand is her first book, about her experiences
living there. Jamie is now married and living happily ever after in the United
Kingdom. She is working on her second book.
Getting
Rooted in New Zealand is available in paperback and ebook on
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1482601907
Jamie Baywood can be followed on the following sites:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7069448.Jamie_Baywood
The accidental writer thing is interesting.
ReplyDeleteJust writing down stories with no intention of them being published actually sounds like a natural thing to do. What is surprising is that one does not hear it all that often from authors.
That sounds like a lot of fun - and I can imagine that Scotland is an entirelyl different challenge now from New Zealand, no matter how 'similar' some of the expressions might be...
ReplyDeleteAwesome blog & very informative post .You can find about good world history.
ReplyDelete