Writing a Collaborative Project with Robert Boyle and Joe Chimenti

From Resilient Writers.

Join Resilient Writers with Robert Boyle and Joe Chimenti, two longtime friends who wrote a book together called Thai Hut Tuesdays. 

It’s a collection of short stories—quick reads you can dip into when you’ve got five minutes and your nervous system needs a reset. And honestly? That’s what this conversation feels like, too.

Bob and Joe have known each other for nearly 30 years. They used to do leadership and sales training together—traveling, teaching, working with people from all over the world. 

And here’s what kept happening: folks might forget the slides and bullet points… but they never forgot the stories. The stories were what landed. The stories were what people carried home.

So they started wondering: what if we gathered the best of those stories—and the ones from our actual lives—and turned them into a book?

They began the project around 2006 (yes—2006!), and they’re very honest about what that long timeline looked like. Life was full. Both of them were raising families (they each have four kids, now grown) and building demanding careers. Bob was a psychologist in private practice. Joe was an executive in corporate America. 

Writing a book wasn’t something they could do in a neat, uninterrupted block of time. It was something they kept returning to—recommitting, especially around the start of a new year, saying: “Okay… this is the year we take it a little further.”

And eventually, they realized the book wasn’t meant to be strictly a leadership book—or even one specific category. It was meant to be human.

They describe it as “Chicken Soup for the Soul meets Nate Bargatze.” In other words: tender, relatable, and also funny—because so many of life’s hardest moments become a little lighter when we can look back and realize, “Oh… this is a shared experience. I’m not broken. I’m human.”

Hear how they actually wrote it together. They split the stories (each wrote half), and they also carved out writing time by meeting up in person—sometimes literally working out of a Courtyard Marriott, laptops open, writing side-by-side, talking through ideas, and enjoying the process as friends.

They also added something that makes the book feel extra supportive: at the end of every story, they share the lesson learned—what that moment taught them, what they wish they’d known, and what a reader might take away, too.

And then there’s the piece so many writers need to hear: they didn’t finish this alone. Working with book coach Meg Calvin helped them bring the whole thing together—structure, clarity, momentum, and the belief that finishing was actually possible.