Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt…

Oh, yeah. I turned 69 years old this week. I’m kind of thinking I should make that a theme for the year. Saturday night, we had a party. Two of my friends out in Spokane area have birthdays within a week of mine so we celebrate together. We all enjoy a cigar and libation in the evening when we’re at camp, so Colleen put together an appropriate birthday cake for us.

That’s really all cake and frosting, and it is was delicious! Three different cigar cake designs for the three “Smoking Hot Men” who were celebrating. Mine, of course, is the one with the “69” on it.

Sunday morning, I picked up and headed for Seattle for the three Fs: Family, Friends, and Fysicians. Turned out that I need to add a fourth F: Ford. My engine warning light came on and something under the hood is making a strange noise. Fortunately, the tachometer says the engine is running at normal speed, despite what the fan sounds like. All the gauges are normal. I’m calling a service company now that I’m here.

That will add to the bill for having my trailer serviced this week while I’m in Seattle. Normal little things like lubricating the slide-out and awning, UV coating the roof, and replacing my exterior speakers. But also, adding a Fantastic Fan to my bedroom skylight so I can get some ventilation when I’m in Arizona.

I plan to be back in the trailer in a week and then off to the southlands about October 14 or 15.

While the site is empty, I spent time Friday and Saturday working on filling and leveling my patio, trimming back encroaching weeds, and clearing brush from under my evergreens. I want this site to look sharp when I get back in May!

It’s October 1 and that means time to prep for NaNoWriMo in earnest. I’m clearing projects away from my desk as rapidly as I can so I can focus on writing the sequel to City Limits in November. I have a ton of notes to be organized and more to be made before I start writing on the first. This year I am going for my fifteenth consecutive NaNoWriMo win.

When I first started participating in NaNo in 2004, I blogged my novels as I wrote them. I’ve stopped doing that for the most part because I have progressed in my writing enough to want to edit before I let people see what I’ve written. Usually. Last year, I had half a dozen readers who followed along as I wrote City Limits on a chapter-by-chapter basis. They commented and advised. They kept commenting for over a month after I finished the first draft and based partly on their recommendations and party on my dissatisfaction, I did nearly a 90% rewrite of the original manuscript in January and February.

How would you like to have been one of the readers of that got to see that first draft? That got to give input on how it progressed and what should be changed? Well, this year you have that opportunity! And you’ll be helping me in more ways than one.

I’m inviting you to join my Patreon Fifth Element Community by November 1 ($10 per month level) and receive links to each day’s writing as it is completed. It won’t be pretty. It might occasionally be confusing. But you’ll see the words take shape straight from the author’s mouth. Join at http://www.patreon.com/nathaneverett.

If you don’t want to make a long-term commitment (and at our age, who can do that?) you can follow one of two alternate paths. Either join in October (which gives you November access on the first of the month) and then cancel anytime after your November contribution has been collected OR make a one-time $10 contribution at http://www.paypal.me/aroslav. Be sure to leave me your email address so I can notify you of new postings.

While I’m preparing to write Wild Woods, you can prepare as well! I’ve posted a lovely, easily-to-navigate, online reading version of City Limits at http://www.nathaneverett.com/releases/citylimits/. If you don’t have an eBook or paperback copy (still available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble), you can read the entire released book online for free! Believe me, one of the things I’ll be doing this month is reading the first volume in this series so Wild Woods is consistent and reads like a continuation of the same story. Why not join me and pass on your comments to me regarding what you read in City Limits?

Collapsible table of contents allows you to expand the chapter subheads to quickly locate your last reading location.

I’ve also installed easy Previous/Next buttons at the end of each page. You can just keep reading!

Now here is something to make your life even more exciting.

A lot of people my age are on a fixed income and simply cut out some of the pleasures in life, like buying books. So I’m progressively making all my books available in an online reading edition for free. Of course, you can still buy the eBooks or paperbacks if you have the necessary resources, but no one should be denied the pleasure of reading my books because of finances. Consider it my own version of a public library.

You’ll find free short stories at http://www.nathaneverett.com/stories/ and free novels at http://www.nathaneverett.com/releases/. Currently, I have City Limits, For Money or Mayhem, and The Gutenberg Rubric available to read for free online. If you are able to contribute, you are invited to, but no one should feel obligated to do so. And if you’d like to contribute so others can read, I’ll graciously accept that as well. I hope soon to be able to add features to the website like reading aloud, but I have to learn how to do that first.

I’d like to do some more shameless self-promotion, but time marches on as illustrated by the last signs of fall harvest here in Northern Idaho. In one of my favorite fields, the wheat straw has now been gathered into these enormous bales and fields are being prepped for planting of the winter crops. Hope you’ve harvested a lot of joy today!