Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of my brand new podcast, Barefooting with Sierra. My name is Sierra Larson, better known as Barefoot Sierra. I am a novelist, comic creator, and independent journalist, and I have been living without shoes since 2010. I created this podcast to keep my audiences in touch with all of my projects, to talk about things I care about, and to interact with the awesome people in my various professional networks.
I’m going to break this podcast up into four parts - novels, comics, journalism, and barefooting - each representing a different aspect of my professional life. I will give you updates on what I am working on, let you know about any new works you can see, and keep you in the know about when I do free book giveaways on Amazon.
Let’s get started!
First up, novels.
Because this is the first episode, I’ll give you a brief run down of my novels. I self-published my first novel, Red 72, in 2015. It is an action novel following Jordan and Tasha Carroll, survivors of a series of chemical terrorist attacks on American soil who have to fight to regain control of the country. I self-published my second novel, Red 72: Genesis, in 2016. It is a companion novel to Red 72. It follows the same events from the perspective of Deirdre Nash, a rural Virginia woman who feels her best bet at survival is to cooperate with the terrorists as they sweep the countryside, executing anyone who dares oppose them. My third novel, Red 72: Exodus, is a sequel to Red 72, and follows Candace Carroll, the daughter of the characters in the first novel. She is now an adult, studying at the University of Virginia, when a second wave of attacks kicks off another war for survival. All three of these books are available on Amazon, and some independent bookstores carry them.
The finale to the Red 72 series, Red 72: Revelation, is with my editor at the moment. This novel continues Candace Carroll’s story as she struggles to readjust to life after the war. As the name suggests, she will come across a major revelation in the book that puts herself and her family in danger.
I have another novel in editing about a horror author from Georgia named Jessica Henley. It is loosely based on the Jeffrey Epstein allegations, but has some twists that the real life case never did.
And because I am always working on something, I have another novel in the works - a postbellum romance. This one is still very much in the formative, exploratory writing stage, where I’m getting to know the characters, but this is one of the things that helps me make my characters more realistic, so it’s an important process for me, even though most of this stuff never ends up in the final book.
Now that you know what I write, I want to tell you how I improve my skills. Last week I attended several panels and masters classes from the San Miguel Writers Conference, over Zoom, of course, because of Covid. I love going to conventions and conferences, where I can meet and interact with others in my trade. I try to go to at least three every year, but because of Covid, I was only able to participate in one in 2020. When I saw the ads for the online San Miguel Writers Conference, I was so excited, because I have missed conventions so much! This was really well executed, and they even included a Zoom link for a “line to the bathroom,” which was just an after panel discussion. If you’ve ever been to a convention and done panels like I have, you’ve probably had the opportunity to chat with the people giving the panel in the hallway after they finish the panel and ask any questions you didn’t get to ask during the panel itself. I have been on both sides of these chats, both asking and answering the questions, and it’s always a great time. So getting to hang out after the panel in an informal setting, in a Zoom link “line for the bathroom,” and ask a book purchasing agent about her job and for more tips about my specific projects was a really great opportunity.
I did five panel sessions this week, two sessions of a book proposal masterclass with book purchasing agent Anna Knutson Geller, two sessions of a How to Edit your own writing with Mississippi based author Gerard Helferich, and a science fiction panel with four different types of science fiction authors that was so well done.
Anna Knutson Geller’s book proposal class was fantastic, and was so helpful for me, even though I self publish. I have to pitch my journalistic writings, and the principles for pitching nonfiction books can be condensed to help me pitch my articles better. I definitely learned a lot about writing better book jacket text, sticking to a target market for my books, and building a marketing plan, which will all be helpful for me as an indie publisher. I already have been working on a business plan for my writing business based on the advice in Joanna Penn’s podcast The Creative Penn, but getting the info from a book purchasing agent gives me even more confirmation of what I need to do to grow as an author. The biggest tip that I didn’t know about before was finding books to compare my book to when submitting a book proposal to a publisher, and how to do that.
Gerard Helferich’s editing master class made me feel like I was back in high school English class. He gave us actual assignments, and really put us to work. I came away from those classes feeling more confident in my abilities to make my writing the best it can be before sending it off to my editor, and that’s always the goal. I want my readers to feel everything I feel as I write the book, to see everything I see in my mind’s eye. As the artist behind the words, it’s my job to convey that for them in the most effective way possible. This class actually lit a fire in my belly to get back to editing, something I have been dragging my feet on for my Jessica Henley project. I did have a few chuckles in the class, though, every time he had us try to edit Stephen King’s writing and improve upon it. Gerard Helferich really does not like the way Stephen King writes. I’m a huge Stephen King fan and feel like the proliferance of details helps build suspense, but it absolutely has to be done right, and this class helped me feel confident in my ability to do exactly that.
I really enjoyed the science fiction panel, and I’m kicking myself for not writing down the names of all the authors that were on the panel. One of them is a gay man from East Tennessee, and talked about how reading and writing science fiction was an escape for him. He could create worlds that were better than the one he lived in. Another author, a man from Mexico, talked about how he used science fiction to deal with his childhood traumas and work through the things he is going through as an adult that are difficult. I really relate to that. Anyone who has read all of my novels has probably noticed that I tend to work sexual violence into almost everything I write. I’m pretty open on my blog about the fact that I am a sexual assault survivor and I talk about the impact those events have had on my life. I still deal with PTSD. I just had a PTSD nightmare last night, in fact. I first started working through these issues through short stories on my LiveJournal and MySpace in high school and university (really showing my age there). Writing can help us heal in a way that only creating something from our pain can.
The advice I heard over and over through the conference was to read the type of books I write. I write both in a journalistic style and most of my fiction fits most comfortably in a crime category or subcategory, other than the postbellum romance I have in the works. I have been reading a lot of romance and historical fiction to get my creative juices flowing for that one, and I also read professional development books. I also have been reading newspaper articles from the time and place I am writing about to get a feel for the way people spoke and what the political opinions of the area were. I got a Newspapers.com subscription so I could get access to that. They aren’t paying me to say this, but I’m not opposed to a sponsorship if someone who can make that happen is by any chance listening.
I’m looking forward to when Covid is over so I can travel, do speaking engagements, be on convention panels, and interact with my fans in person again. All of my favorite conventions have gone online for the time being, which is great, but there is nothing like those in person interactions. In 2019, I attended Chicago Wizard World with my best friend where I got to hang out and chat with Christopher Priest, the first Black comic creator. I have a Black Panther poster he signed, along with Bob Almond and Sal Vellutu, who I met later in the year at Salt Lake FanX. I also did Edmonton Comic Expo in 2019, where I spoke on self publishing. The Edmonton Expo loves having me as a guest, but right now the expo center is a covid testing center. With vaccine rollouts, I’m hoping we’ll be back to normal convention seasons for 2021.
Until then, I’m going to keep writing, keep editing, and keep getting my books out there for all of you lovely people. I haven’t been hitting my daily word count goal of 500 words because I have been a bit preoccupied with personal life problems. If you follow me on Instagram @sierrathebarefoot or read my blog sierrathebarefootgirl.com you already saw the announcement that I’m getting divorced. Seems like weird timing to be writing a romance, but creating almost a parody of my own relationship while giving it a happy ending is yet another exercise in healing.
Now on to my comics!
I publish my comics on @worldofpossums on Instagram and bonus content at patreon.com/possumpete. Does that name give you a clue about my subject matter? That’s right, I make comics about North America’s only marsupial.
My first encounter with a possum, or an opossum if you want to be finicky about it, was when I was about 8 years old in Sacramento, California. I was taking the trash out, and this creature was laying on the ground next to the dumpster in the parking lot of our apartment. It was fuzzy and grey and had a long, naked tail. It looked like a giant rat. I had never seen a rat before, but I was sure this was a rat. I thought it was dead, but when I got closer it hissed at me. I screamed, threw the bag in the trash, and ran back to our apartment. I told my mom that there was a rabid rat by the dumpster. She had me describe it and explained that it was just a possum but agreed that it was probably rabid.
We moved from Sacramento, to Jacksonville, Florida when I was 10 years old, and I somehow managed not to see any opossums or rats in the 5 years I lived there. When I was 15, my dad got a job offer in Tennessee, so we took a trip up to check the area out. My parents took us to a dinner theater where one of the songs included a line about eating possum. I wondered what kind of backwater hellscape we were moving to.
Flash forward two years. Chris Crocker, also known as the “Leave Britney Alone Guy” captured the spotlight with his staged emotional outburst defending Britney Spears on YouTube. When I found out he was from Tennessee, I looked up his YouTube page and watched all of his videos, hoping to recognize something from Knox County in one of them. I didn’t find any of that because he’s not from Knoxville, but I did find several hilarious videos and I fell in love with his style of comedy. His people for the ethical treatment of vegetables video, where he told us that we shouldn’t eat things that are alive, was second only to the video where he sang, “Wake up sleepyhead, you’re a little possum. Wake up sleepyhead, the morning is awesome!” to his boyfriend. From that point on, I started calling anyone sleepy a possum, and added the phrase “awesome possum” to my vocabulary.
In the first year that I was married to Peter, I worked nights at a restaurant, and he was working days at his parents’ family business, which meant our sleep schedules rarely lined up. He quickly gained the possum nickname. As I started writing novels, Peter wanted me to base a character on him, and I eventually did base one of the terrorists in Red 72: Genesis on him, which for some reason delighted him.
All the while, I kept calling him possum. He went with it, and would send me videos of possums when he came across them on Facebook. Far from being the freakish monster that terrorized me beside the dumpster as a child, I came to realize that these beings are gentle, tick eating, rabies-proof superheroes. That’s right, possums can’t get rabies. Their body temperature is too low.
I started a drop shipping company in 2019, where I would market other people’s products for them, then have them ship the products directly to the customer. My best selling item was a sterling silver possum ring. I also had mugs and tshirts with possums on them. I marketed these products on Instagram. I decided I would get more traction if I had a mascot, so I doodled up a little line drawing possum and posted a picture of it, asking my followers what they thought. They encouraged me to keep drawing, so I did. My possum drawing style gradually morphed into a set style, and I started calling my little mascot Pete.
While visiting my parents, my mom helped me design a girlfriend for Pete, who I called Petunia. I created a comic of Peter digging through a dumpster to find discarded flowers to take to Petunia, and gave him emoji heart eyes every time he saw her in a comic. My followers loved it. Soon I was posting more and more Pete and Petunia comics to promote my drop shipping store, but the comics were getting more attention than the store. I set up a Patreon and immediately got a subscriber. Then another, and another. I decided to close my drop shipping store and focus on what really made people happy - possum comics.
When Peter and I separated last year, Pete and Petunia also separated. Just like with my novels, the comics are a great way to process what is going on around me and create art that helps me heal. Petunia went through apartment hunting with me, and complained about how much of a pain it is to have to move in the same words that I did. While they were still together, Pete and Petunia adopted an orphaned baby possum named Paul that they found wandering looking for his dead mama, and now my characters are navigating the struggles of coparenting as I try to figure it out too.
I don’t shy away from political issues, either. Mitch McConnell, Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris have all made appearances in my comics. It’s not all serious, though. Pete has a trash can that he can use to travel through time and space, which he stumbled on completely by accident. His misadventures as he tried to get back to the present were quite fun to draw. He got chased by dinosaurs, had another lady possum after him, and visited France. I even made him go to Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech as one of his stops.
My comic creation style is pen and ink on paper. That’s not such a common creation form in this day and age, where everything seems to be digital. I had the opportunity to meet Milivoj Ceran at an Edmonton Expo a few years ago and moderate the two panels he did. Milivoj Ceran does art for Magic the Gathering cards, and unlike most artists, he still creates with pen, ink, and paint. I really appreciate what he explained when I asked him why he prefers traditional creation over digital, and it explains how I feel as well. He told me that he has done digital, and he can do digital, but if he draws an ice cream cone on a screen, no matter how good it looks, as soon as he turns off the screen, his art is gone too. With traditional art, you have it physically there. You created something tangible. You could even lick that ice cream cone you drew if you want to.
I’ve tried digital art creation for my comics. I’m clumsy at it, but I was clumsy at my pen and ink comics at first too. But it’s not the same. In the end, it’s just pixels. There’s just something about having those sketchbooks full of comics that I can take out and show people when they come over and ask me what I’m working on.
It was in those early, clumsy days that something Christopher Priest told me really stuck with me. He was interested in my novels, and in comparing our creative processes, but his eyes really lit up when I told him that I’d started making comics too. I was talking to a comic book legend, the man who made Black Panther cool again. I didn’t want him to think I was anywhere near his level. I bashfully told him that they’re just line drawings with little speech bubbles, and he told me, “If you’re making pictures and putting words with them, you’re a comic creator.” That stuck with me, and in those moments of doubt, I have his faith in me to lean on.
I’ll probably never end up working for Marvel or DC, but just like with the rise of independent book publishing, independent comics have never been more accessible. Gone are the days when comic book stores were the only access points for comics. All it takes for me to publish is an internet connection or signal for my iPhone. Between Instagram, Patreon, and Facebook, I have everything I need to market and sell my comics to my fans. I’m still trying to figure out TikTok. The one video I made that got over 1000 views was just me making fun of one of the Capitol rioters. Speaking of TikTok, follow me @sierraisbarefoot. One of these days I’ll figure out the algorithm on there, but they’ll probably just change it on me as soon as I do. Oh well.
I have stalled a bit on my Possum Pete in print comic book, which I was all gung ho about finishing last year. That whole divorce business really through my creativity through a loop. I am still posting new comics on my Instagram and Patreon, though, and I’ll get back on the physical comic book train when it feels right for me to do so. So much of what I already had completed no longer fits into the narrative, but Pete is a time travelling possum, after all. What’s to stop him from hopping in his magic trash can and time travelling to back before he and Petunia separated for the sake of saving the comic book pages I already completed?
Alright, next up is journalism.
When I started my blog in 2011, I never thought it would grow the way it did. I ended up getting all kinds of opportunities that I didn’t even imagine possible. I hosted the Barefoot is Legal podcast for a while, Huffington Post interviewed me, I even wrote a short book about how to go barefoot full time! It’s called A Brief Guide to Barefooting, and it’s available on Amazon.
I’ve had journalists emailing me about the interesting things I do almost my whole life, from the art projects I was involved in in high school to my living without shoes. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been interviewed on the news, on the radio, for the newspaper, or as a podcast guest. I’ve given plenty of interviews at conventions as well, and in turn, been the person to moderate panels, and in effect, be the person interviewing convention guests. The Edmonton Comic Expo always gives comment cards to the guests and moderators to ask us how the convention volunteers are doing and what they can improve on, and I remember one of the guests I interviewed making a remark that it was obvious that I was the writer and he was the artist, because he drew a little doodle on his and I wrote a veritable essay on mine. This was before I started doing my comics, of course.
Even when I’m not interviewing in a formal setting, I love writing about what is going on around me. I have been submitting articles to the paper since I was twelve years old. As a freelance journalist, I’m free to write about any topic that interests me, and there are oh, so many things that interest me. Animals, cryptids, true crime, the outdoors, travel, natural living, social equity… I could go on listing topics, but I’m pretty sure that could get really boring for everyone listening, so I’ll proceed.
Last fall, Barefoot Jake Brown asked me to come on board with his Bare Sole Project as his team blogger while he helped with wildfire relief in Eugene, Oregon. Writing for this project was a great way to dip my toes into professional journalism, and within weeks of finishing the relief project in Eugene, I signed up to go back to school for a degree in communications, with an emphasis in journalism.
I already consider myself a freelance journalist, and I write articles for as many publications as will take my writing. As much as I love writing novels, I haven’t hit the New York Times best seller list yet, so I have to do extra writing to supplement my income, in addition to a full time job. It’s a lot, but I make it work.
My latest freelance article is a piece on bears in the fall edition of Outside Bozeman. I sent it in as a blind submission, meaning they didn’t request a specific topic from me and I hadn’t ever written for them before. They liked it and they decided to run it, which meant a paycheque for me, yay! More importantly, I’m now on their list of contributors, so they send me the list of topics they are looking for articles about and I can tailor my writing to them.
But journalism goes beyond just articles in magazines and newspapers. Some of the greatest journalists of our time are famous for the books they wrote. Into the Wild painted striking images in our collective mind of a social misfit who ended up dead in an abandoned bus in Alaska. Christopher McCandles would have remained anonymous in death if it hadn’t been for Jon Krakauer.
I have been working on a journalistic style true crime book, detailing the ins and outs of a high profile local crime that has suffered from biased media reporting and is currently waiting on results from a second appeal trial. I aim to look at every detail of this case under a metaphorical magnifying glass and help my readers make sense of all the information put forward by the prosecution, the defense, and the media.
But I want to do it right, which is why I enrolled in a degree program. I’m improving my nonfiction writing skills even more, which is important, but I’m also learning ethics in journalism, which is even more vital to this book. It’s a project that may take me years to finish due to the sheer magnitude of information I have to go through, but it’s a story that’s worth telling right.
The accused and their family asked me multiple times why I wanted to write a book about their case. After so much media scrutiny, and so much of that reporting biased against them, I can understand them being wary. My first interest in this case had to do with proximity - this is a local family, people I actually have met, accused of something that if true, would paint them as horrible people. That is in contrast to what I have witnessed in my interactions with them.
Due to ongoing research, as well as the pending appeal, I won’t go into any specifics as to details of the case, but I will tell you about the process I have been using for writing so far. First, I made a timeline of the events according to what I knew. Then, I broke each of those events into the facts that I knew about it. My experience with novel writing and the outlining process I use for those books has been especially helpful for this. As I filled in the facts I knew about each event, I looked for primary, secondary, and tertiary sources for information. In this case, I consider primary sources to be anyone who was actually present during the event. I consider a secondary source to be someone who heard about the event from someone who was there. I consider a tertiary source to be news media reports. So in this case, my book will be a tertiary report, but will contain primary and secondary reports.
Once I have gathered that information, I formulate my theory as to what caused that event. In this particular case, there are multiple proposed causes of death, and I am attempting to explain which cause of death is the most likely one, which would then explain who is at fault for the death, if anyone. At the end of the book, I will go over all of the evidences for the various causes of death and present my conclusion. I’m not writing this book to make the accused about to be malicious, deceitful, or otherwise present them in any negative light. This book is, like all of my writing, my natural response to trying to figure things out that I can’t explain.
To say that I have been enjoying this particular writing project wouldn’t exactly be accurate, because I am investigating a tragic death. I am uncovering all sorts of information that I wasn’t aware of, though, and that part of the process is fascinating to me. I love learning new things, and the more I know about this case, the more connections I am able to make. This particular case feels like a rabbit hole made of rabbit holes and I’m eager to be able to tell you all more about it as I continue working on it.
Because I am not a lawyer, I am not attempting to convict anyone with any evidence I present in my book. I am explaining my theory, a theory that is well thought out and presented with supporting evidence collected over years of conducting interviews and reading court documents.
Conducting interviews is probably my favorite part of journalism. I mentioned the Bare Sole Project I worked on with Jake Brown earlier. I had the opportunity to interview a woman that Jake and the Bare Soul Project helped place in a hotel room after they evacuated from the Holiday Farm Fire in Oregon. Her name was Debbie, and she had a story that could break your heart. (In fact, I think most people do, if you ask them the right questions). Debbie told me about the terrifying escape she and her partner, Buonsong made through the burning forest, over dark roads they were unfamiliar with. They felt lost the entire way as they evacuated to Eugene. It was especially difficult for Buonsong, who has been lost in the forest before. Buonsong picks wild mushrooms in the forest, and one night he went too far into the woods and couldn’t find his way back. Debbie laughed as she recalled that the first thing she said to him when he came walking out of the woods was, “I told you not to get lost!”
Interviewing Debbie felt as natural to me as talking to any of the artists and creators I have had the pleasure of being a panel moderator for at conventions. The flow of our conversation was natural, and once she got comfortable with telling me her story, it was easy to direct her with questions that kept her narrative going. Piecing the interview together into an article for the blog post on baresoleproject.com was the most fun I had had on any of the articles I wrote for them during their relief project.
I love interviewing people, and I’m hoping at some point in the near future to start getting guests for this segment of the podcast. I would love to get in touch with some of the awesome people I don’t have a chance to interact with in person at the moment because of covid and chat about their stories. If you have an interesting story to tell, please email me at sierrathebarefootgirl@gmail.com.
Last but not least, let’s talk about barefooting!
I have been living my life more or less without shoes since 2010. Covid has slightly changed my footloose and fancy free habits, but not out of fear of contracting the virus if I don’t have shoes on. It’s a respiratory virus, first of all. Second, I’m pretty sure it’s more likely to stick to the fabric of my shoes than it is to skin. But the real reason I have been wearing shoes a bit more than I usually would is because of quarantine.
We’re all supposed to be staying home as much as possible to prevent the spread of the virus. I have been doing my part and I only go out for absolute essentials. This means that I am inside that vast majority of the time, and my feet didn’t get a chance to get used to the weather as it got colder this year, especially because I was in a two week quarantine after being exposed to someone with the virus and not being allowed to leave my apartment at all.
It gets really cold where I live in Edmonton, Canada. Today it got down to -20 C (that’s -4 F for all of you Americans listening). Normally I would be able to tolerate a short walking that temperature with no problem, but even the rest of my body was freaking out from the cold. I had shoes, a parka, and gloves on, but I was so cold! And I only walked half a block from my car to the door.
I’ve always disliked wearing shoes. I remember arguing with my mom in preschool about how much I hated wearing shoes because they felt bad on my feet. I wore flip flops most of the time that I had to wear shoes. I refused to learn how to tie my shoes up until grade 6, when my gym teacher forced me to learn to tie my gym shoes on threat of failing me if I didn’t. My first boyfriend would tease me about the fact that I never wore what he called “real shoes,” which I guess were athletic shoes. His opinion didn’t matter much to me, and we broke up after a few weeks of dating when I told him to stop being such an immature idiot. My next boyfriend also teased me about my footwear, laughing about my choice to wear flip flops when we went hiking. In retrospect, he was also an immature idiot.
I read Into the Wild in high school and learned that Chris McCandless hated wearing socks. I could definitely relate to that. I tolerated toe socks for a while because my toes could still wiggle, but they were still disgusting germ sponges on my feet and I hated them.
When I was 19, I entered an online amateur modeling contest, and one of the fans following the contest noticed that I was barefoot in nearly every photo. He asked me if I was a barefooter. I didn’t know what that was, so he explained it’s someone who doesn’t wear shoes by choice. At that time, I didn’t realize that was a thing. Being young and naive, he was able to convince me to start a blog on a foot fetish site, but before long I ventured out on my own and began blogging about my shoeless adventures on my own website.
I have been interviewed by the Edmonton Journal, CTV News, Global News, Alberta Prime Time, Huffington Post, Bridge City News, and more about my barefoot lifestyle. I think confidence has the biggest part to play in being able to pull off a barefoot life. If you are acting like you are doing something wrong, people are going to pick up on that, and look for whatever it is that you are doing that is suspicious. If you walk around confidently, knowing that there are no laws or health codes that prohibit going barefoot, you will avoid most negative encounters.
Of course I still do have negative encounters. There are going to be people convinced that they are right no matter what, even when they are wrong. There is a certain large corporation that is notorious for employees harassing barefoot shoppers on the grounds of it being a store policy that shoes are required even though the corporate office says otherwise. Sometimes I’m able to stand my ground and convince the employees that it’s fine for me to be barefoot in this store and sometimes I concede and put on my emergency flats just so I can get away from them, only to take them off a few aisles away. With how cold it has been lately, I have been wearing shoes more, though, so I haven’t had any negative encounters recently.
I’m hoping to go at least majority barefoot, for most, if not all of the rest of my life. I can’t see the future, so I can’t say for sure what will happen, but I don’t see myself ever become a full time shoe wearer ever. I can’t stand having the things on my feet.
I’ve had people reach out to me on Instagram in the last few days saying I live a dream life to be able to live barefoot most of the time and asking me how I do it. The truth to it is really quite simple. I just took off my shoes. That’s it. I took off my shoes and kept walking. It’s easier to not do something than to do something, and I’m choosing to not wear shoes. I’ve saved countless time by not having to stop at the door to don footwear every time I need to leave.
For people needing more in depth information about how to get started going barefoot, I do of course have my book A Brief Guide to Barefooting, available on Amazon. I do occasionally have it go on sale for free, and I’ll let you know when that happens. If you are wanting the information, I recommend just purchasing the book, because I’m limited by Amazon to offering it for free ebook download once every quarter.
Some resources I found helpful when I started going barefoot full time were Society for Barefoot Living on Facebook and borntolivebarefoot.org. There are other groups and blogs out there, but these are the ones I found most helpful.
I have been posting videos on my Tiktok of me going out in the snow. It wasn’t actually that cold during those videos, and they are relatively short videos, as Tiktok is limited to 59 seconds maximum. Most of those videos are me walking from the door to my car or taking my trash out. It makes for great content, but it’s not an extreme tree hour hike in the snow. Always use caution when going barefoot in extreme weather, be it hot or cold.
Some barefoot news for you:
From NECN.com, a helicopter rescue team had to come to the aid of two trail runners on Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire mountain after one of them lost his shoes in the snow and kept going, barefoot, through several feet of snow. 35-year-old Michael Burleson and 34-year old Nicholas Drouin called 911 after they lost the trail amid 40 mph (65 kph) winds, snow, and freezing temperatures. The report does not indicate whether it was Burleson or Drouin that lost their shoes, but states that they continued barefoot until they were forced to stop due to frozen extremities.This strikes me as incredibly reckless. Obviously I don’t know the full situation, but to go out trail running in that kind of weather conditions seems like they were taking unnecessary risks. I’m glad the rescue crew was able to come get them, and hopefully the frostbite damage won’t be too bad. That’s exactly why I take the precautions I do in winter, though.
From People.com, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was barefoot under her desk during a Zoom call to Senegal. She appears to have kicked off her heels, as they were under her desk. I don’t know why this is considered newsworthy, especially because people do this at work all the time, but I guess anything royals do ends up in tabloids.
From villages-news.com, Marcia Nell Vandersnick, age 75, got into an altercation with her 73 year old boyfriend on Nov 7 and fled the scene barefoot and in her pajamas. She has been staying in a hotel since then, due to a no contact order taken out because she allegedly threatened to kill him. She left a cut on his arm in the shape of her fingernail. He has dropped the charges and said she can return home because he has mental and physical health problems that he would like her to assist him with. The prosecutor tried to object, but she is home now. This whole relationship seems super toxic to me, but according to the police report, she had been drinking that night, so maybe she just got a little out of hand and they really love each other. Who knows.
From fox5sandiego.com, Tarson Powers was driving home from buying a new pair of shoes when he came across the scene of a car accident. One of the crash survivors was wandering around the collision wreckage barefoot, so Powers pulled over and offered his new shoes to the man. The man offered to return the shoes later, but Powers told him to keep them. “He was barefoot, he was shaken up and he needed shoes,” Powers told a freelance photographer at the scene. “He can keep them. It’ll be my one good deed for the day.” Ok, this is really sweet, and the world needs more people like Tarson Powers.
Thanks so much for listening in. If you have any questions or comments, you can send them to sierrathebarefootgirl@gmail.com. All of my books are available on Amazon, and my comics are available on Instagram @worldofpossums. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening. Until next time, this has been Barefooting with Sierra
I’m going to break this podcast up into four parts - novels, comics, journalism, and barefooting - each representing a different aspect of my professional life. I will give you updates on what I am working on, let you know about any new works you can see, and keep you in the know about when I do free book giveaways on Amazon.
Let’s get started!
First up, novels.
Because this is the first episode, I’ll give you a brief run down of my novels. I self-published my first novel, Red 72, in 2015. It is an action novel following Jordan and Tasha Carroll, survivors of a series of chemical terrorist attacks on American soil who have to fight to regain control of the country. I self-published my second novel, Red 72: Genesis, in 2016. It is a companion novel to Red 72. It follows the same events from the perspective of Deirdre Nash, a rural Virginia woman who feels her best bet at survival is to cooperate with the terrorists as they sweep the countryside, executing anyone who dares oppose them. My third novel, Red 72: Exodus, is a sequel to Red 72, and follows Candace Carroll, the daughter of the characters in the first novel. She is now an adult, studying at the University of Virginia, when a second wave of attacks kicks off another war for survival. All three of these books are available on Amazon, and some independent bookstores carry them.
The finale to the Red 72 series, Red 72: Revelation, is with my editor at the moment. This novel continues Candace Carroll’s story as she struggles to readjust to life after the war. As the name suggests, she will come across a major revelation in the book that puts herself and her family in danger.
I have another novel in editing about a horror author from Georgia named Jessica Henley. It is loosely based on the Jeffrey Epstein allegations, but has some twists that the real life case never did.
And because I am always working on something, I have another novel in the works - a postbellum romance. This one is still very much in the formative, exploratory writing stage, where I’m getting to know the characters, but this is one of the things that helps me make my characters more realistic, so it’s an important process for me, even though most of this stuff never ends up in the final book.
Now that you know what I write, I want to tell you how I improve my skills. Last week I attended several panels and masters classes from the San Miguel Writers Conference, over Zoom, of course, because of Covid. I love going to conventions and conferences, where I can meet and interact with others in my trade. I try to go to at least three every year, but because of Covid, I was only able to participate in one in 2020. When I saw the ads for the online San Miguel Writers Conference, I was so excited, because I have missed conventions so much! This was really well executed, and they even included a Zoom link for a “line to the bathroom,” which was just an after panel discussion. If you’ve ever been to a convention and done panels like I have, you’ve probably had the opportunity to chat with the people giving the panel in the hallway after they finish the panel and ask any questions you didn’t get to ask during the panel itself. I have been on both sides of these chats, both asking and answering the questions, and it’s always a great time. So getting to hang out after the panel in an informal setting, in a Zoom link “line for the bathroom,” and ask a book purchasing agent about her job and for more tips about my specific projects was a really great opportunity.
I did five panel sessions this week, two sessions of a book proposal masterclass with book purchasing agent Anna Knutson Geller, two sessions of a How to Edit your own writing with Mississippi based author Gerard Helferich, and a science fiction panel with four different types of science fiction authors that was so well done.
Anna Knutson Geller’s book proposal class was fantastic, and was so helpful for me, even though I self publish. I have to pitch my journalistic writings, and the principles for pitching nonfiction books can be condensed to help me pitch my articles better. I definitely learned a lot about writing better book jacket text, sticking to a target market for my books, and building a marketing plan, which will all be helpful for me as an indie publisher. I already have been working on a business plan for my writing business based on the advice in Joanna Penn’s podcast The Creative Penn, but getting the info from a book purchasing agent gives me even more confirmation of what I need to do to grow as an author. The biggest tip that I didn’t know about before was finding books to compare my book to when submitting a book proposal to a publisher, and how to do that.
Gerard Helferich’s editing master class made me feel like I was back in high school English class. He gave us actual assignments, and really put us to work. I came away from those classes feeling more confident in my abilities to make my writing the best it can be before sending it off to my editor, and that’s always the goal. I want my readers to feel everything I feel as I write the book, to see everything I see in my mind’s eye. As the artist behind the words, it’s my job to convey that for them in the most effective way possible. This class actually lit a fire in my belly to get back to editing, something I have been dragging my feet on for my Jessica Henley project. I did have a few chuckles in the class, though, every time he had us try to edit Stephen King’s writing and improve upon it. Gerard Helferich really does not like the way Stephen King writes. I’m a huge Stephen King fan and feel like the proliferance of details helps build suspense, but it absolutely has to be done right, and this class helped me feel confident in my ability to do exactly that.
I really enjoyed the science fiction panel, and I’m kicking myself for not writing down the names of all the authors that were on the panel. One of them is a gay man from East Tennessee, and talked about how reading and writing science fiction was an escape for him. He could create worlds that were better than the one he lived in. Another author, a man from Mexico, talked about how he used science fiction to deal with his childhood traumas and work through the things he is going through as an adult that are difficult. I really relate to that. Anyone who has read all of my novels has probably noticed that I tend to work sexual violence into almost everything I write. I’m pretty open on my blog about the fact that I am a sexual assault survivor and I talk about the impact those events have had on my life. I still deal with PTSD. I just had a PTSD nightmare last night, in fact. I first started working through these issues through short stories on my LiveJournal and MySpace in high school and university (really showing my age there). Writing can help us heal in a way that only creating something from our pain can.
The advice I heard over and over through the conference was to read the type of books I write. I write both in a journalistic style and most of my fiction fits most comfortably in a crime category or subcategory, other than the postbellum romance I have in the works. I have been reading a lot of romance and historical fiction to get my creative juices flowing for that one, and I also read professional development books. I also have been reading newspaper articles from the time and place I am writing about to get a feel for the way people spoke and what the political opinions of the area were. I got a Newspapers.com subscription so I could get access to that. They aren’t paying me to say this, but I’m not opposed to a sponsorship if someone who can make that happen is by any chance listening.
I’m looking forward to when Covid is over so I can travel, do speaking engagements, be on convention panels, and interact with my fans in person again. All of my favorite conventions have gone online for the time being, which is great, but there is nothing like those in person interactions. In 2019, I attended Chicago Wizard World with my best friend where I got to hang out and chat with Christopher Priest, the first Black comic creator. I have a Black Panther poster he signed, along with Bob Almond and Sal Vellutu, who I met later in the year at Salt Lake FanX. I also did Edmonton Comic Expo in 2019, where I spoke on self publishing. The Edmonton Expo loves having me as a guest, but right now the expo center is a covid testing center. With vaccine rollouts, I’m hoping we’ll be back to normal convention seasons for 2021.
Until then, I’m going to keep writing, keep editing, and keep getting my books out there for all of you lovely people. I haven’t been hitting my daily word count goal of 500 words because I have been a bit preoccupied with personal life problems. If you follow me on Instagram @sierrathebarefoot or read my blog sierrathebarefootgirl.com you already saw the announcement that I’m getting divorced. Seems like weird timing to be writing a romance, but creating almost a parody of my own relationship while giving it a happy ending is yet another exercise in healing.
Now on to my comics!
I publish my comics on @worldofpossums on Instagram and bonus content at patreon.com/possumpete. Does that name give you a clue about my subject matter? That’s right, I make comics about North America’s only marsupial.
My first encounter with a possum, or an opossum if you want to be finicky about it, was when I was about 8 years old in Sacramento, California. I was taking the trash out, and this creature was laying on the ground next to the dumpster in the parking lot of our apartment. It was fuzzy and grey and had a long, naked tail. It looked like a giant rat. I had never seen a rat before, but I was sure this was a rat. I thought it was dead, but when I got closer it hissed at me. I screamed, threw the bag in the trash, and ran back to our apartment. I told my mom that there was a rabid rat by the dumpster. She had me describe it and explained that it was just a possum but agreed that it was probably rabid.
We moved from Sacramento, to Jacksonville, Florida when I was 10 years old, and I somehow managed not to see any opossums or rats in the 5 years I lived there. When I was 15, my dad got a job offer in Tennessee, so we took a trip up to check the area out. My parents took us to a dinner theater where one of the songs included a line about eating possum. I wondered what kind of backwater hellscape we were moving to.
Flash forward two years. Chris Crocker, also known as the “Leave Britney Alone Guy” captured the spotlight with his staged emotional outburst defending Britney Spears on YouTube. When I found out he was from Tennessee, I looked up his YouTube page and watched all of his videos, hoping to recognize something from Knox County in one of them. I didn’t find any of that because he’s not from Knoxville, but I did find several hilarious videos and I fell in love with his style of comedy. His people for the ethical treatment of vegetables video, where he told us that we shouldn’t eat things that are alive, was second only to the video where he sang, “Wake up sleepyhead, you’re a little possum. Wake up sleepyhead, the morning is awesome!” to his boyfriend. From that point on, I started calling anyone sleepy a possum, and added the phrase “awesome possum” to my vocabulary.
In the first year that I was married to Peter, I worked nights at a restaurant, and he was working days at his parents’ family business, which meant our sleep schedules rarely lined up. He quickly gained the possum nickname. As I started writing novels, Peter wanted me to base a character on him, and I eventually did base one of the terrorists in Red 72: Genesis on him, which for some reason delighted him.
All the while, I kept calling him possum. He went with it, and would send me videos of possums when he came across them on Facebook. Far from being the freakish monster that terrorized me beside the dumpster as a child, I came to realize that these beings are gentle, tick eating, rabies-proof superheroes. That’s right, possums can’t get rabies. Their body temperature is too low.
I started a drop shipping company in 2019, where I would market other people’s products for them, then have them ship the products directly to the customer. My best selling item was a sterling silver possum ring. I also had mugs and tshirts with possums on them. I marketed these products on Instagram. I decided I would get more traction if I had a mascot, so I doodled up a little line drawing possum and posted a picture of it, asking my followers what they thought. They encouraged me to keep drawing, so I did. My possum drawing style gradually morphed into a set style, and I started calling my little mascot Pete.
While visiting my parents, my mom helped me design a girlfriend for Pete, who I called Petunia. I created a comic of Peter digging through a dumpster to find discarded flowers to take to Petunia, and gave him emoji heart eyes every time he saw her in a comic. My followers loved it. Soon I was posting more and more Pete and Petunia comics to promote my drop shipping store, but the comics were getting more attention than the store. I set up a Patreon and immediately got a subscriber. Then another, and another. I decided to close my drop shipping store and focus on what really made people happy - possum comics.
When Peter and I separated last year, Pete and Petunia also separated. Just like with my novels, the comics are a great way to process what is going on around me and create art that helps me heal. Petunia went through apartment hunting with me, and complained about how much of a pain it is to have to move in the same words that I did. While they were still together, Pete and Petunia adopted an orphaned baby possum named Paul that they found wandering looking for his dead mama, and now my characters are navigating the struggles of coparenting as I try to figure it out too.
I don’t shy away from political issues, either. Mitch McConnell, Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris have all made appearances in my comics. It’s not all serious, though. Pete has a trash can that he can use to travel through time and space, which he stumbled on completely by accident. His misadventures as he tried to get back to the present were quite fun to draw. He got chased by dinosaurs, had another lady possum after him, and visited France. I even made him go to Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech as one of his stops.
My comic creation style is pen and ink on paper. That’s not such a common creation form in this day and age, where everything seems to be digital. I had the opportunity to meet Milivoj Ceran at an Edmonton Expo a few years ago and moderate the two panels he did. Milivoj Ceran does art for Magic the Gathering cards, and unlike most artists, he still creates with pen, ink, and paint. I really appreciate what he explained when I asked him why he prefers traditional creation over digital, and it explains how I feel as well. He told me that he has done digital, and he can do digital, but if he draws an ice cream cone on a screen, no matter how good it looks, as soon as he turns off the screen, his art is gone too. With traditional art, you have it physically there. You created something tangible. You could even lick that ice cream cone you drew if you want to.
I’ve tried digital art creation for my comics. I’m clumsy at it, but I was clumsy at my pen and ink comics at first too. But it’s not the same. In the end, it’s just pixels. There’s just something about having those sketchbooks full of comics that I can take out and show people when they come over and ask me what I’m working on.
It was in those early, clumsy days that something Christopher Priest told me really stuck with me. He was interested in my novels, and in comparing our creative processes, but his eyes really lit up when I told him that I’d started making comics too. I was talking to a comic book legend, the man who made Black Panther cool again. I didn’t want him to think I was anywhere near his level. I bashfully told him that they’re just line drawings with little speech bubbles, and he told me, “If you’re making pictures and putting words with them, you’re a comic creator.” That stuck with me, and in those moments of doubt, I have his faith in me to lean on.
I’ll probably never end up working for Marvel or DC, but just like with the rise of independent book publishing, independent comics have never been more accessible. Gone are the days when comic book stores were the only access points for comics. All it takes for me to publish is an internet connection or signal for my iPhone. Between Instagram, Patreon, and Facebook, I have everything I need to market and sell my comics to my fans. I’m still trying to figure out TikTok. The one video I made that got over 1000 views was just me making fun of one of the Capitol rioters. Speaking of TikTok, follow me @sierraisbarefoot. One of these days I’ll figure out the algorithm on there, but they’ll probably just change it on me as soon as I do. Oh well.
I have stalled a bit on my Possum Pete in print comic book, which I was all gung ho about finishing last year. That whole divorce business really through my creativity through a loop. I am still posting new comics on my Instagram and Patreon, though, and I’ll get back on the physical comic book train when it feels right for me to do so. So much of what I already had completed no longer fits into the narrative, but Pete is a time travelling possum, after all. What’s to stop him from hopping in his magic trash can and time travelling to back before he and Petunia separated for the sake of saving the comic book pages I already completed?
Alright, next up is journalism.
When I started my blog in 2011, I never thought it would grow the way it did. I ended up getting all kinds of opportunities that I didn’t even imagine possible. I hosted the Barefoot is Legal podcast for a while, Huffington Post interviewed me, I even wrote a short book about how to go barefoot full time! It’s called A Brief Guide to Barefooting, and it’s available on Amazon.
I’ve had journalists emailing me about the interesting things I do almost my whole life, from the art projects I was involved in in high school to my living without shoes. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been interviewed on the news, on the radio, for the newspaper, or as a podcast guest. I’ve given plenty of interviews at conventions as well, and in turn, been the person to moderate panels, and in effect, be the person interviewing convention guests. The Edmonton Comic Expo always gives comment cards to the guests and moderators to ask us how the convention volunteers are doing and what they can improve on, and I remember one of the guests I interviewed making a remark that it was obvious that I was the writer and he was the artist, because he drew a little doodle on his and I wrote a veritable essay on mine. This was before I started doing my comics, of course.
Even when I’m not interviewing in a formal setting, I love writing about what is going on around me. I have been submitting articles to the paper since I was twelve years old. As a freelance journalist, I’m free to write about any topic that interests me, and there are oh, so many things that interest me. Animals, cryptids, true crime, the outdoors, travel, natural living, social equity… I could go on listing topics, but I’m pretty sure that could get really boring for everyone listening, so I’ll proceed.
Last fall, Barefoot Jake Brown asked me to come on board with his Bare Sole Project as his team blogger while he helped with wildfire relief in Eugene, Oregon. Writing for this project was a great way to dip my toes into professional journalism, and within weeks of finishing the relief project in Eugene, I signed up to go back to school for a degree in communications, with an emphasis in journalism.
I already consider myself a freelance journalist, and I write articles for as many publications as will take my writing. As much as I love writing novels, I haven’t hit the New York Times best seller list yet, so I have to do extra writing to supplement my income, in addition to a full time job. It’s a lot, but I make it work.
My latest freelance article is a piece on bears in the fall edition of Outside Bozeman. I sent it in as a blind submission, meaning they didn’t request a specific topic from me and I hadn’t ever written for them before. They liked it and they decided to run it, which meant a paycheque for me, yay! More importantly, I’m now on their list of contributors, so they send me the list of topics they are looking for articles about and I can tailor my writing to them.
But journalism goes beyond just articles in magazines and newspapers. Some of the greatest journalists of our time are famous for the books they wrote. Into the Wild painted striking images in our collective mind of a social misfit who ended up dead in an abandoned bus in Alaska. Christopher McCandles would have remained anonymous in death if it hadn’t been for Jon Krakauer.
I have been working on a journalistic style true crime book, detailing the ins and outs of a high profile local crime that has suffered from biased media reporting and is currently waiting on results from a second appeal trial. I aim to look at every detail of this case under a metaphorical magnifying glass and help my readers make sense of all the information put forward by the prosecution, the defense, and the media.
But I want to do it right, which is why I enrolled in a degree program. I’m improving my nonfiction writing skills even more, which is important, but I’m also learning ethics in journalism, which is even more vital to this book. It’s a project that may take me years to finish due to the sheer magnitude of information I have to go through, but it’s a story that’s worth telling right.
The accused and their family asked me multiple times why I wanted to write a book about their case. After so much media scrutiny, and so much of that reporting biased against them, I can understand them being wary. My first interest in this case had to do with proximity - this is a local family, people I actually have met, accused of something that if true, would paint them as horrible people. That is in contrast to what I have witnessed in my interactions with them.
Due to ongoing research, as well as the pending appeal, I won’t go into any specifics as to details of the case, but I will tell you about the process I have been using for writing so far. First, I made a timeline of the events according to what I knew. Then, I broke each of those events into the facts that I knew about it. My experience with novel writing and the outlining process I use for those books has been especially helpful for this. As I filled in the facts I knew about each event, I looked for primary, secondary, and tertiary sources for information. In this case, I consider primary sources to be anyone who was actually present during the event. I consider a secondary source to be someone who heard about the event from someone who was there. I consider a tertiary source to be news media reports. So in this case, my book will be a tertiary report, but will contain primary and secondary reports.
Once I have gathered that information, I formulate my theory as to what caused that event. In this particular case, there are multiple proposed causes of death, and I am attempting to explain which cause of death is the most likely one, which would then explain who is at fault for the death, if anyone. At the end of the book, I will go over all of the evidences for the various causes of death and present my conclusion. I’m not writing this book to make the accused about to be malicious, deceitful, or otherwise present them in any negative light. This book is, like all of my writing, my natural response to trying to figure things out that I can’t explain.
To say that I have been enjoying this particular writing project wouldn’t exactly be accurate, because I am investigating a tragic death. I am uncovering all sorts of information that I wasn’t aware of, though, and that part of the process is fascinating to me. I love learning new things, and the more I know about this case, the more connections I am able to make. This particular case feels like a rabbit hole made of rabbit holes and I’m eager to be able to tell you all more about it as I continue working on it.
Because I am not a lawyer, I am not attempting to convict anyone with any evidence I present in my book. I am explaining my theory, a theory that is well thought out and presented with supporting evidence collected over years of conducting interviews and reading court documents.
Conducting interviews is probably my favorite part of journalism. I mentioned the Bare Sole Project I worked on with Jake Brown earlier. I had the opportunity to interview a woman that Jake and the Bare Soul Project helped place in a hotel room after they evacuated from the Holiday Farm Fire in Oregon. Her name was Debbie, and she had a story that could break your heart. (In fact, I think most people do, if you ask them the right questions). Debbie told me about the terrifying escape she and her partner, Buonsong made through the burning forest, over dark roads they were unfamiliar with. They felt lost the entire way as they evacuated to Eugene. It was especially difficult for Buonsong, who has been lost in the forest before. Buonsong picks wild mushrooms in the forest, and one night he went too far into the woods and couldn’t find his way back. Debbie laughed as she recalled that the first thing she said to him when he came walking out of the woods was, “I told you not to get lost!”
Interviewing Debbie felt as natural to me as talking to any of the artists and creators I have had the pleasure of being a panel moderator for at conventions. The flow of our conversation was natural, and once she got comfortable with telling me her story, it was easy to direct her with questions that kept her narrative going. Piecing the interview together into an article for the blog post on baresoleproject.com was the most fun I had had on any of the articles I wrote for them during their relief project.
I love interviewing people, and I’m hoping at some point in the near future to start getting guests for this segment of the podcast. I would love to get in touch with some of the awesome people I don’t have a chance to interact with in person at the moment because of covid and chat about their stories. If you have an interesting story to tell, please email me at sierrathebarefootgirl@gmail.com.
Last but not least, let’s talk about barefooting!
I have been living my life more or less without shoes since 2010. Covid has slightly changed my footloose and fancy free habits, but not out of fear of contracting the virus if I don’t have shoes on. It’s a respiratory virus, first of all. Second, I’m pretty sure it’s more likely to stick to the fabric of my shoes than it is to skin. But the real reason I have been wearing shoes a bit more than I usually would is because of quarantine.
We’re all supposed to be staying home as much as possible to prevent the spread of the virus. I have been doing my part and I only go out for absolute essentials. This means that I am inside that vast majority of the time, and my feet didn’t get a chance to get used to the weather as it got colder this year, especially because I was in a two week quarantine after being exposed to someone with the virus and not being allowed to leave my apartment at all.
It gets really cold where I live in Edmonton, Canada. Today it got down to -20 C (that’s -4 F for all of you Americans listening). Normally I would be able to tolerate a short walking that temperature with no problem, but even the rest of my body was freaking out from the cold. I had shoes, a parka, and gloves on, but I was so cold! And I only walked half a block from my car to the door.
I’ve always disliked wearing shoes. I remember arguing with my mom in preschool about how much I hated wearing shoes because they felt bad on my feet. I wore flip flops most of the time that I had to wear shoes. I refused to learn how to tie my shoes up until grade 6, when my gym teacher forced me to learn to tie my gym shoes on threat of failing me if I didn’t. My first boyfriend would tease me about the fact that I never wore what he called “real shoes,” which I guess were athletic shoes. His opinion didn’t matter much to me, and we broke up after a few weeks of dating when I told him to stop being such an immature idiot. My next boyfriend also teased me about my footwear, laughing about my choice to wear flip flops when we went hiking. In retrospect, he was also an immature idiot.
I read Into the Wild in high school and learned that Chris McCandless hated wearing socks. I could definitely relate to that. I tolerated toe socks for a while because my toes could still wiggle, but they were still disgusting germ sponges on my feet and I hated them.
When I was 19, I entered an online amateur modeling contest, and one of the fans following the contest noticed that I was barefoot in nearly every photo. He asked me if I was a barefooter. I didn’t know what that was, so he explained it’s someone who doesn’t wear shoes by choice. At that time, I didn’t realize that was a thing. Being young and naive, he was able to convince me to start a blog on a foot fetish site, but before long I ventured out on my own and began blogging about my shoeless adventures on my own website.
I have been interviewed by the Edmonton Journal, CTV News, Global News, Alberta Prime Time, Huffington Post, Bridge City News, and more about my barefoot lifestyle. I think confidence has the biggest part to play in being able to pull off a barefoot life. If you are acting like you are doing something wrong, people are going to pick up on that, and look for whatever it is that you are doing that is suspicious. If you walk around confidently, knowing that there are no laws or health codes that prohibit going barefoot, you will avoid most negative encounters.
Of course I still do have negative encounters. There are going to be people convinced that they are right no matter what, even when they are wrong. There is a certain large corporation that is notorious for employees harassing barefoot shoppers on the grounds of it being a store policy that shoes are required even though the corporate office says otherwise. Sometimes I’m able to stand my ground and convince the employees that it’s fine for me to be barefoot in this store and sometimes I concede and put on my emergency flats just so I can get away from them, only to take them off a few aisles away. With how cold it has been lately, I have been wearing shoes more, though, so I haven’t had any negative encounters recently.
I’m hoping to go at least majority barefoot, for most, if not all of the rest of my life. I can’t see the future, so I can’t say for sure what will happen, but I don’t see myself ever become a full time shoe wearer ever. I can’t stand having the things on my feet.
I’ve had people reach out to me on Instagram in the last few days saying I live a dream life to be able to live barefoot most of the time and asking me how I do it. The truth to it is really quite simple. I just took off my shoes. That’s it. I took off my shoes and kept walking. It’s easier to not do something than to do something, and I’m choosing to not wear shoes. I’ve saved countless time by not having to stop at the door to don footwear every time I need to leave.
For people needing more in depth information about how to get started going barefoot, I do of course have my book A Brief Guide to Barefooting, available on Amazon. I do occasionally have it go on sale for free, and I’ll let you know when that happens. If you are wanting the information, I recommend just purchasing the book, because I’m limited by Amazon to offering it for free ebook download once every quarter.
Some resources I found helpful when I started going barefoot full time were Society for Barefoot Living on Facebook and borntolivebarefoot.org. There are other groups and blogs out there, but these are the ones I found most helpful.
I have been posting videos on my Tiktok of me going out in the snow. It wasn’t actually that cold during those videos, and they are relatively short videos, as Tiktok is limited to 59 seconds maximum. Most of those videos are me walking from the door to my car or taking my trash out. It makes for great content, but it’s not an extreme tree hour hike in the snow. Always use caution when going barefoot in extreme weather, be it hot or cold.
Some barefoot news for you:
From NECN.com, a helicopter rescue team had to come to the aid of two trail runners on Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire mountain after one of them lost his shoes in the snow and kept going, barefoot, through several feet of snow. 35-year-old Michael Burleson and 34-year old Nicholas Drouin called 911 after they lost the trail amid 40 mph (65 kph) winds, snow, and freezing temperatures. The report does not indicate whether it was Burleson or Drouin that lost their shoes, but states that they continued barefoot until they were forced to stop due to frozen extremities.This strikes me as incredibly reckless. Obviously I don’t know the full situation, but to go out trail running in that kind of weather conditions seems like they were taking unnecessary risks. I’m glad the rescue crew was able to come get them, and hopefully the frostbite damage won’t be too bad. That’s exactly why I take the precautions I do in winter, though.
From People.com, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was barefoot under her desk during a Zoom call to Senegal. She appears to have kicked off her heels, as they were under her desk. I don’t know why this is considered newsworthy, especially because people do this at work all the time, but I guess anything royals do ends up in tabloids.
From villages-news.com, Marcia Nell Vandersnick, age 75, got into an altercation with her 73 year old boyfriend on Nov 7 and fled the scene barefoot and in her pajamas. She has been staying in a hotel since then, due to a no contact order taken out because she allegedly threatened to kill him. She left a cut on his arm in the shape of her fingernail. He has dropped the charges and said she can return home because he has mental and physical health problems that he would like her to assist him with. The prosecutor tried to object, but she is home now. This whole relationship seems super toxic to me, but according to the police report, she had been drinking that night, so maybe she just got a little out of hand and they really love each other. Who knows.
From fox5sandiego.com, Tarson Powers was driving home from buying a new pair of shoes when he came across the scene of a car accident. One of the crash survivors was wandering around the collision wreckage barefoot, so Powers pulled over and offered his new shoes to the man. The man offered to return the shoes later, but Powers told him to keep them. “He was barefoot, he was shaken up and he needed shoes,” Powers told a freelance photographer at the scene. “He can keep them. It’ll be my one good deed for the day.” Ok, this is really sweet, and the world needs more people like Tarson Powers.
Thanks so much for listening in. If you have any questions or comments, you can send them to sierrathebarefootgirl@gmail.com. All of my books are available on Amazon, and my comics are available on Instagram @worldofpossums. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening. Until next time, this has been Barefooting with Sierra
