Episode 103 – You can also listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts, and Amazon Music
About the Episode
In this episode of the “I Love New Mexico” podcast, host Bunny Terry reflects on her journey from blogging to podcasting, driven by her love for New Mexico and the encouragement of her late friend, Elaine. Bunny shares personal stories, emphasizing the importance of storytelling, community, and the impact of supportive friends. She discusses the evolution of her content, the challenges faced, and her motivations, which are rooted in passion rather than financial gain. Bunny invites listeners to share their own stories, fostering a sense of belonging and celebrating the diverse voices of New Mexico.
Links and resources:
Three Bears Lodge (first blog)
Launch My Book
Gary Vaynerchuk
Lifesaving Gratitude
I Love New Mexico blog page
Bunny’s website
I Love New Mexico Instagram
I Love New Mexico Facebook
Original Music by: Kene Terry
Transcript
Bunny 00:00:06 Hi there. I’m Bunny Terry and I’m the host of the I Love New Mexico podcast. We talk about everything here. There are no boundaries. We talk to people who are from all corners of the state, people who are chefs, who are tourists, who are artists, who are Chamber of Commerce executives, and who are from ranch families that have been here for hundreds of years. New Mexico is enchanting, and it’s interesting. And I can’t believe I get to do this job. New Mexico is so amazing, and I invite you to come along for the ride on the I Love of New Mexico podcast. Thanks for being here. As many of you know who follow the podcast. Johanna and I recently recorded our 100th episode and It. After we did that, we took a look at how the podcast was doing in general. And Johanna, because this is part of her job in managing my life and being not just my podcast producer, but also the operations manager of my real estate business said, you know, I think that we should, take some steps to get a broader audience and perhaps crazy idea monetize what we’re doing here.
Bunny 00:01:33 I mean, could, you know, mom, you’ve been working really hard on this. Could we actually make some money from it? And I said, as I always do, it would be so cool if there was a financial reward component to this podcast. But the truth is, we do it for the love of it. And so she made an appointment and we spoke to a podcast consultant who was, I would say less of less of a consultant and more of a sales person who wanted to get us involved in a coaching program where they would tell us, you know, how to figure out our keywords, how to increase our audience, how to figure out who we should have as guests that would actually help us make some money from this. And in that process, what I figured out was that I care less about making money and more about telling stories. Although, yeah, if you guys want to send us a dollar an episode or something like that, would that would be quite lovely, because every hour that we spend creating this, we have less time to, for, for what’s our real job, even though I’m just talking in circles because I don’t really care about making money with this podcast.
Bunny 00:02:47 But the interesting part of speaking with the consultant slash salesperson is that he made us go through this exercise of why we do the podcast, And that was an eye opener in and of itself, because sometimes you’re so in the middle of something that you forget about Y or you don’t quantify why you do something. And after we spoke with him, I thought to myself, why is it that we do this? And I thought about the answers that we had given him. I explained to him how the I Love New Mexico blog started and how it progressed and the moments we had where, I didn’t I wasn’t as devoted to creating content about New Mexico as other times. And then I thought, wait a second, that’s my next podcast episode because it feels like I have we have this very devoted core fan group. And thank you to all of you out there who are in that devoted group. And it felt like a good time to go back and explain to everybody how this began and why we want to continue, and why we continue to give energy to something that doesn’t really make us a lot of money, but makes us very happy.
Bunny 00:04:12 So the I Love New Mexico blog was obviously the first piece of this, this content creation that is all based around things that happen in New Mexico. In 2009, I was living in my hometown of Logan, New Mexico. Johanna had gone. We had moved there in 2004, and she had gone to, eighth through 12th grade there. And it was, I thought, a really a gift. I mean, she would tell you two different. She probably has two different versions of that, one of which is that she got moved to a town where her grandparents lived, and she could walk over to their house for lunch every day. Something. Memories that we really cherish now that we’ve lost both of them, they could go to her events, you know, they could watch her get inducted into the honor society or go to a track meet or, go to a volleyball game and watch her play. And the other thing is that we could spend time around family and old friends that we couldn’t have done if we had stayed in Albuquerque at that point in our life.
Bunny 00:05:28 so we had been living in Logan for five years, and she had graduated from high school in May of 2009. So by the end of 2009, I was feeling kind of lonely. I was a single mom, I lived in this place, where in the summertime, because of you, Lake Logan was huge fun, and there were always a lot of people in town, and I was working as a realtor, and I was very busy, during the summertime. I also worked on the side as a paralegal, trying to keep, you know, trying to make ends meet, hold things together. I had this crazy schedule where I would do real estate, maybe Thursday through Sunday, and then on Monday morning at like 630 in the morning, I would jump in the car and I would drive to Clovis, and I would work for Randy Harris as a paralegal. And, I would do that work, put in some ten hour days, and then I would run back home. I would stay, spend the night with Glenna, usually my one of my oldest friends in my life.
Bunny 00:06:35 And then on Tuesday evening, I would shoot home so that I could be back in Logan for school activities and to work at the real estate office. So 2019 had been this very busy year. Johanna graduating from high school and the summer. Why do I keep saying 2019? 2009 I keep trying to shave a decade off of my life. But in 2009, I had this crazy schedule of trying to make ends meet. And and I was I was lonely for for my girl, for my daughter who had left home and was a freshman at the University of New Mexico. And my friend Elaine, who was my writing partner at the time, she and I, she was not such a secret writer. She loved to write articles, and she was working on a degree at a stage in her life when most people are sort of settling down and considering retirement. But Elaine was going to school. She was an artist. She was a painter. She was very accomplished. And she was also writing all the time.
Bunny 00:07:49 And she said to me, Bunny, you and I are going to be writing partners. And every time you write something, which I did on a regular basis, she would say, send it to me. I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll send you what I’m writing and you can tell me what you think. And so we were shooting these. Writing these pieces of prose back and forth between each other. She lived in Logan, and she would drop by the office and say hello to me. And, then she would say, what’d you write this morning? Because she knew that I had this practice of writing a thousand words every morning. Every morning. And I would say, oh, God, Lane, it was such drivel. She would say, no, no, no, send it to me. I’ll tell you the best parts. And then she would send it back to me where she had highlighted maybe one sentence, and she would say, look at this. This is a gem.
Bunny 00:08:40 This is a piece of art. It was so incredible to me to have somebody who took what I had been doing my entire life and looked at it and said, wow, wow, look at. So even if I’d written a thousand words, she might pick out seven a string of seven words, and she would send them back to me and she would say, save this, because this is really, really good. She didn’t pass judgment on the rest of what I had written. She only told me what I was doing right. And then one evening in October, because Elaine and her husband also had businesses in the Philippines, and they would fly back and forth. She had lived for a while in Korea and had taught English at a school in Seoul. And she would send me emails and say, look what I’m doing. Look at what I’m teaching these students. This is how I’m teaching English to kids who don’t don’t have any idea what, how to speak English. She would do that while she was in Seoul, and then she would come back and we would get together and we would talk about what? We talked about words all the time.
Bunny 00:09:50 We talked about the importance of words which which then became the importance of stories. And she in October she came back from a visit to Seoul and she said, Bunny. I’m writing a blog now. And I was like, what? And she said, I don’t even know what a blog is. And she said, oh no, no, no, no, you got to get online. You have to take a look. You have to see, here’s here’s this person, you can follow this guy named Gary Vaynerchuk. I think if you pay attention to what he’s doing, he’ll give you some ideas. But I think that we ought to be writing a blog, because now that we’ve been sharing all of our words with each other, I think it’s time to put them out in public. And I, and I know this will surprise those of you who know me. Not now, but at the time I thought, I, I don’t I don’t want to put my words out in public. I mean, I’ve been writing a novel my entire life, but I the reason it had never seen the light of day is because I couldn’t bear the thought of actually failing.
Bunny 00:10:47 I couldn’t bear the idea that somebody might read my words and say, you are not a writer. I mean, this whole persona that I had based my internal confidence on might be dashed against the rocks of somebody else’s criticism. I, I would say I’ve learned a lot since then, which is that everybody’s going to be critical at some point, or a lot of people are going to be critical, but the people who matter are going to support you in the best way possible. And Elaine was that person for me anyway. She said, Bunny, you have to start writing a blog. And I was like, oh God, what? What is she even talking about? So I did what I always do. I got online and I started following Gary Vee, who at the time was just Gary Vaynerchuk. And, he, he was the one person who had been blogging longer than anybody else. And he talked about what blogs were and why they should be written and why we should present them to the world.
Bunny 00:11:46 And it’s the funniest thing is that at the end of December, when Johanna had come home for Christmas and, I think that Zachary might have been home for Christmas as well. Late at night. One night I was reading Gary V and it was still about, well, what do you write about? What do you write about? What’s you know here? Elaine was writing about her travels, and she was devoted to doing it because she said, if we write blogs, then our kids will know us better. maybe after they’ve grown older or maybe after we’re gone, which seemed like the funniest thing in the world, because Elaine and I were young at that time. In 2009, I was 49. And, I knew that that it was going to be a long, long time before either of us died. But Gary Vee said, if you’re going to write a blog, you should write it about what you love. And so I thought, well, you know, this this was the musing, my musings over several evenings making notes in a little notebook, which is something I still do every day.
Bunny 00:12:51 I thought, what is it that I love? I mean, I could write about my kids, I love my kids, I love my family, I love my parents, those. But what do I really love that is sustainable and will be interesting to other people over time. And I realized that what I loved was New Mexico and thus the I Love New Mexico blog was born, and my first blog post was written about the Three Bears Lodge in Red River, because for my birthday, my boyfriend at the time took me to Red River for the weekend and we stayed at the Three Bears Lodge, and I wrote a blog post about that. And if you want to find it, you can go back to the very, very beginning, which where you’ll find I don’t I don’t even know. This is this is under I love New Mexico dot wordpress.com where, where the blog began in 2009. So I wrote a blog post about that, and then I wrote a few more blog posts about, Two casitas were a place that we stayed in in Santa Fe long before I considered living in Santa Fe.
Bunny 00:14:11 Then I wrote a few, recipes. One of the most popular blogs at that time was about my green Chile breakfast, which was had a very simple recipe for making green chili sauce. But thus the I Love New Mexico blog was born. Now how do we get from the I Love New Mexico blog to the I Love New Mexico podcast? So the cool thing was that over all this time, I’m writing all these blog posts and Elaine is encouraging me and she keeps saying, you got to keep doing this, you got to keep doing this. And then, Elaine died. She it was shocking. It was a shocking event in my life. And at a moment when I was thinking about stopping at a moment when I thought, man, I’m just getting like two comments per blog post and I don’t have that big A following and this is taking up so much time and energy. I lost Elaine as a friend. She had an she was in an accident and at home and passed away at a very young age.
Bunny 00:15:22 And I thought, wait a second, I can’t stop. I mean, I can’t stop, I can’t stop writing, I can’t stop exploring. I can’t stop caring about sharing stories now. I mean, I can’t. My own heart is broken at the loss of this great friend. I guess I gotta keep moving forward in the middle of all that. And and, actually, at the, you know, about. I don’t I can’t tell you exactly. Now. I can’t look back and tell you the date for when we lost Elaine, but I also started thinking about moving away from Logan, and Johanna was now almost finished with college and just felt like it was time. I had been really ugly, dumped by the boyfriend who had taken me to the Three Bears Lodge. like so ugly dumped that he had like found a different girlfriend while he was living with me, and they had moved sort of down the road for me so that I passed where they lived every single day. And I was like, I’ve got to get out of here.
Bunny 00:16:29 So I moved to Santa Fe, which was a dream, which was made possible because I had started writing the blog and then I, because I had written blogs for two casitas. Two Casitas hired me to be their digital marketer. Other people hired me to write blogs for them, and I was able to take that digital marketing business and move to Santa Fe. And I moved to Santa Fe in August of 2012. It was a dream come true. I sold my house, made a little bit of money. I got here and, moved here in August of 2012 and in November. And this is a story many of you know. So just indulge me here. But in November of 2012, I was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer, despite thinking I was the healthiest person in the room. Out of that journey, which is a which was a long and arduous journey to get well. And the spoiler alert, of course, is that I survived out of that and out of the 1000 words a day that I wrote, and out of the confidence that was gifted to me by my friend Elaine, I was able to write a book called Life Saving Gratitude How Gratitude Helped Me Beat stage four cancer.
Bunny 00:17:54 All of those, all of that. The the the being able to move to Santa Fe because I had digital customers. Being able to write the book because I had created confidence from. About growing an audience. All of that came from my friend Elaine saying to me, Bunny, look at these five lines you put in in this email. They’re absolute treasures. So I want to say today, first of all, I started to tell you the story of the birth of this podcast. But I want to tell you, if you can be that friend to somebody, you can change their life. That’s what Elaine calls Elaine. Gerard quarrels. She was a girl who grew up in nearby. That’s what Elaine gave me. Elaine gave me this huge confidence in my writing and a love for telling, telling stories and sharing them. And that if you can give that to somebody else today. It’s what I hope that I give everybody that I come in contact with. You can change their life. That’s that’s when you have real impact.
Bunny 00:19:10 When we lift each other up and we collaborate and we create something together that we never, ever envisioned at the beginning. Those nights in 2009 when I was listening to Gary Vee talk about content and doing what you love and writing about what you love, I had no idea that it would bring me to this moment in my life where I’m telling people who, you know, we have downloads of about 250 per episode, but that grows every week. We are now at the point where I believe we’ve had almost 40,000 downloads of this podcast. All of that came from Elaine encouraging me to continue to write things and to continue to tell stories. But I want to tell you, it didn’t stop with the stage four colon cancer diagnosis or the book that I wrote afterwards. After when I wrote the book, I, you know, agonized as I had for years about how it was going to get published. And I kept thinking, you know, I talked to traditional publishers, and then I talked to people who had self-published books.
Bunny 00:20:16 And what I heard from everybody was that the, the, the traditional publishing route, which is very glamorous. And, you know, maybe, maybe your good book gets bought, maybe it doesn’t, but then, you know, it has to get designed and then it gets put on a shelf and then it gets promoted. And then, you know, maybe you’re going to make, you know, $0.50 a copy, maybe you’re not, but it takes a lot of time. So I consulted with a company called Launch My Book. And the owner of that company said, Bunny, I’ve done both. I’ve helped people get traditionally published, and I’ve also helped them self-publish. But he said, if you want to get traditionally published, if you want to publish this book that you’ve written about your cancer journey and about how gratitude helped save your life. It’s going to be years before it gets published if you try the traditional route. And he said, I can’t guarantee you it’s going to get bought. And of course, I still am not 100% confident about my work.
Bunny 00:21:14 But I thought, and I thought and I thought about it and I thought, you know, the one thing I want with this book is I want my words to begin to help people who might find themselves in a place where they’ve been diagnosed with cancer and they’re scared to death because that’s how scared you are. When you get cancer, you’re really scared to death because you’re scared about death. I thought, I want to get this in the hands of people. It can help, but I also want my mom and dad to hold this book in their hands. And so I said to Joel at launch, my book. I said, let’s do the self-publishing route. And so Joel helped me. They edited, they helped me get started, and we got the book published in January of 2021. I will say that the reviews have been very good. I will say that people who don’t even like books have told me that they’ve been unable to put it down. I don’t know, it’s it’s, you know, it’s like having a baby.
Bunny 00:22:15 Once you get it, once you get it out in the world, you stop worrying so much about the creation process and you just sort of move on with your life. But I got the book published. And in the middle of all that, while Joel was teaching me how to create an audiobook, he said, and you’re going to want to do a podcast, right? And I was like, why? I can’t do a podcast? And he said, no, no, no, no, no. It’s really important to promote your book. let’s do a podcast called Life Saving Gratitude. Well, you know, Johanna and I were in the middle of the pandemic at that moment, and we were shut down, and then we’d reopen and we were shut down. We’d reopen. And so we’re like, we can do a podcast. We’ll we’ll take that leap. and I will tell you that Johanna and I are an example of don’t wait for perfect. done is always much better than perfect. We just took this leap and began creating a podcast, and we did the Life Saving Gratitude podcast for, I believe, a couple of years at least, at least a year and a half.
Bunny 00:23:18 We talked to a lot of people about mindset and gratitude, and we heard, you know, we told our own gratitude stories. and then after a certain amount of time, I said, Johanna, I’m, I’m kind of bored with this, with the Life Saving Gratitude podcast. I mean, we’ve done it. We’ve had some fun doing it. But it feels to me like we’re having a lot of similar conversations. And she said in her infinite Johanna Wisdom, she said, Bunny, she’s mom. She doesn’t call me Bunny. She said, why are you not doing a podcast about New Mexico? I mean, that’s what you know, that’s what you’ve always loved. That’s what you feel is really important. And so 102 episodes ago, we began. And I want to thank you. Those of you who have been faithful from the beginning, those of you who have only recently found us. I want to thank you, first of all, for sitting through this long winded story of how we got to the I Love New Mexico podcast.
Bunny 00:24:27 I want to thank you. Those of you who have listened to me talk when I’ve talked on my own about things like my favorite teacher, Mrs. Horne, who was two episodes ago, and we’ll provide a link to that. I want to thank my guests who have shown up with enthusiasm and great stories themselves, and I want to thank the guests to come. I mostly want to say to those of you who are sitting out there and listening, thinking, you know, I don’t really have an important story to tell. I don’t have things. I’m not creative. I’m not one of those people who is an artist or a creator or a writer or a storyteller. I want to give you a word of encouragement today, like Elaine did for me back in the fall of 2009, when we were both living in Logan, thinking we didn’t have enough to do and thinking that our stories were not important. They are everything that Elaine recorded or said in those last several years of her life is cherished by her kids and her family.
Bunny 00:25:32 But more than that, the people that she encouraged because I know it wasn’t just me, I know that that was her gift in the world, was to encourage people and to make them feel like what they were doing was important to all of you out there who feel like you don’t have an important story to tell. Get in touch with us. We’d like to hear from you. We would like to put your story on the air. And if you’re not quite ready for that, just reach out to me. You can get in touch with us at the I Love New Mexico. Blog at gmail.com and tell us what your frustrations are or what you wish you felt brave enough to do that you’re not quite sure about. This podcast was born out of a desire to put my fears aside and start telling stories that might change somebody else’s life. I know they’ve changed mine, and I know you have to thank you so much for being a part of this podcast.