Road Worthy

It’s been a good week, though not as productive in every area as I wanted. My writing fell off to only 28,000 words this week as I took care of other business.

I never thought I’d see the day when I said ‘only’ in reference to that kind of number. But I’m sharpening my keyboard in preparation for Camp NaNoWriMo starting tomorrow (April 1). This week I had a small client project that took up a bit of my writing time. Can always use the extra income!

April! I’m suddenly staring at the end of winter in Arizona and taxes. I guess my interruption in productivity isn’t over yet. The project I did this week was from a financial advisor who titled one of his chapters, ‘Given Death and Taxes, Choose Death.’ Thank you but I think I’ll get my taxes done this afternoon!

I’ve once again celebrated the birth of my daughter this week. We had a lovely chat and I’m still amazed at how time changes us. I remember this

Almost better than this

Happy birthday, sweetie.

Faced with the reality of heading for Idaho in just two short weeks, I made a last trip down to Yuma to get ready. My high-res mouse died. It’s clicker no longer clicks. So, my first stop was at Best Buy to get a new mouse. I’m happy. Then I needed to get the truck ready. Tire inflation and oil change. It’s running great and ready for the road.

And then there was the problem of what to do with me. For one thing, I need a new profile pic for the back cover of my book. What I had isn’t quite suitable, so I got the lawn mowed and the hedges trimmed a bit.

Well, it’s closer to being human.

I was amazed at how green everything is out here in the desert. I stopped to take pictures of the crops in the fields in Yuma Valley. Of course, you can see right away why they are green. The pipes run through the fields and sprinklers feed water from the irrigation canals to make the desert bloom with crops.

Being a Midwesterner, I wasn’t familiar with the planting techniques out here. This is a field prepared for planting.

The pipes are laid in the furrows and the crops are planted on the ridges. A million people come out to pull weeds and tend the young crops. Another place we get food.

April is a great time to become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/join/NathanEverett. I’ll be posting the pre-release serialization of two new novels beginning in April. I’ve mentioned a lot about Wild Woods, the sequel to last year’s City Limits. I expect the last proofread copy in from my editors this week and will start a last readthrough and formatting of the story for pre-release on my website. Wild Woods continues the story of Gee Evars as he and his fiancé work to make Rosebud Falls and the Forest a better place to live. Mysteries hidden in the newly acquired Wild Woods, however, will shake the very foundations of their community. And Gee will discover who he is and why he is there.

At the same time, I’ll begin the pre-release serialization of Municipal Blondes, the sequel to the Dag Hamar mystery, For Blood or Money, my first published book. I’d like to say this story continues Dag Hamar, but alas, it is narrated by his faithful partner, Deb Riley, as she chases down the loose ends of the mystery Dag died trying to solve. Her penchant for disguise and not exactly following the rules land Deb in hot water almost from the beginning of the book as she heads back to the Condo, down to Belize, and across the ocean to track down the missing pieces.

The pre-release serials will be available to my patrons before anyone else as a thank you for your support!

So far, plans for simultaneous release of both books in June are progressing!

Maybe I was a little chatty in this post, but it’s almost time to shed the winter plumage and wing my way north. I guess first, I’d better do the taxes!

Happily Ever After is a Fairy Tale

This week, a new serialized version of my first published novel, For Blood or Money, completed. You can check it out at http://nathaneverett.com/releases/fbom/

Written in 2006, For Blood or Money was first released as Security and Exchange in an anthology to raise money for building libraries in third world countries. We raised over $5,000 that year. The next year, the fledgling boutique publisher Long Tale Press released the book as For Blood or Money. It was my first commercial release and was well-received. I still have a couple of copies from its first printing. That was back before ‘on-demand’ publishing took hold. Good times.

The problem was my detective narrator died at the end of the story. Bummer. Readers wanted more of him. I resolved the problem five years later by writing a prequel, For Money or Mayhem. I raised some charitable funds with that book as well, selling a character in the book for $1,800 donated to Studio East Training for the Performing Arts (https://studio-east.org/). I like giving things away and when I don’t have money, I give away what I have: Words.

The problem was the detective’s girlfriend died at the end of the story. Poor Dag Hamar. Happily ever after seemed to be eluding him. Or at least eluding my readers.

Response to the end of For Blood or Money has been mixed. Here are a few samples taken from comments and email I’ve received this week.

“What an extraordinary story! Thanks.”
“Well, fuck!”
“Wow! Best ending--ever.”
“AAAhhhhhhh I do hate unhappy endings. Oh well a very good story just the same.”
“Magnificent story. The ending suits the tale.”
“Too bad you seem to prefer unhappy endings to your stories.”
“A great ending. More please.”
“The ending was very disappointing. I'm not just talking about the unhappy ending, but all the loose ends. 1) The unsolved code 2) No letter to Riley explaining his decision 3) Nothing for Billie 4) Maizie will eat his dead face when he's not alive to feed her. After the Gutenberg Rubric, this story was a major disappointment. But thanks for writing.”

Of course, I want to dwell on the last comment because it is instructive, listing the things the reader was disappointed in. It got me thinking about the nature of death and what it does to us. Well, it kills us, I guess. But I don’t know of anyone who was truly prepared to die. No one has all the loose ends of life tied up in a neat package with every string resolved. Every time I think about this, I think of all the things I need to get put in order in my life before I go traipsing around the world next fall.

Does someone have the password for my computer? Does anyone know who to contact? Will I disappear from my story sites and leave a hole that goes unfilled like an Indiana pothole? What happens to royalties and patronage? Heck! I should clean my refrigerator!

Dag’s life is not tidily wrapped up. It simply ends. It is no longer his concern. It leaves unanswered questions. It is left to those who survive to write the next chapter. One more comment I received:

“Any story that makes you pause and do some own self thinking about one's life choices is a good story. Your story is a great story! It made me just sit and think, as I'm dating a girl right now. Have I made my feelings toward her as known as I want them to be? So, I had a sit down and chat with her.”

What very few people know is I wrote a sequel to For Blood or Money in 2006 as well. Portions of it were written in parallel with the mystery and I considered at one time doing a flip-book where you read the story from one perspective from front to back and from another perspective from back to front.

I dug the manuscript for Municipal Blondes out of my files when I started serializing For Blood or Money and decided it was time for this book to see daylight. The story is narrated by Dag Hamar’s intrepid partner, Deb Riley. Riley was as important to For Blood or Money as Dag and he gradually turned more and more of the investigation over to her, ending by telling her there was a tattoo on a corpse that had the information needed to solve the code.

Municipal Blondes picks up the story in the hospital a few days before the end of For Blood or Money. It’s written in Riley’s voice and from her determination to finish Dag’s story. But it is no longer Dag’s story. It is Riley’s. And it has its own questions to be answered.

I’ve become almost obsessed over completing the rewrite of Municipal Blondes and it is coming along so well that I’ve decided to do a joint release of the mystery with Wild Woods on June 23. The contrast between the two books will be something to see!

Wild Woods is now in final proofreading and I expect the remaining readers to have their corrections to me by the first of April so I can start formatting the files for publication. Details on the double release will be available soon!

There. That’s as close to a happy ending as this blog post will ever have!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

The day when everyone in America becomes Irish Catholic. I’m thinking that surely the day will come when we have a holiday on which everyone in America becomes Iraqi Muslim for a day. We could be sober, eat Halal foods, and spend the day looking over our shoulders for white supremacist assassins. My dress code today is not green, but black.

I saw one of those ‘stupid memes’ on Facebook. But in the wake of murders committed by white supremacists now taking hold around the world I found this to be an interesting take.

How odd that even supporters of the current administration recognize that in the world’s eyes we’ve allowed ‘being American’ to be equated with being racist. Instead of standing up to stop American racism, we are told to be bold in claiming it.

In case you were wondering, I've grown a philosopher's beard, so I can wax eloquent on this subject. And any other.

That brings me, logically enough, to my writing adventure. Doesn’t everything? I completed the ‘final’ draft of Wild Woods last week and sent it off to four proofreaders. I am so thankful for these people who have volunteered their time to help make my book stronger and error-free. The first of the proofreaders has already responded with well over 100 errors spotted. No matter how careful an author, even reading aloud, we see what should be there rather than what is there. A lot like life.

Reading comments from the story editors and integrating them into the story brought home a couple of points that I’d written but hadn’t yet absorbed into my life. Sometimes I write things and later it’s like “Why didn’t I think of that?” Dummy. The key element that I took away from rereading Wild Woods was this.

I’ve long believed that our purpose on earth is to make the world a better place than we found it. I have admired people who stood up and made a difference, whether that was politically, religiously, socially, scientifically, or educationally. Any other ‘ally’s you want to put in there. These are people who made a difference. So why isn’t the world a wonderful happy place and getting better each day?

What could make the world a better place than watching the Mariners beat the Diamondbacks in spring training??? I think they won. We were ahead 6-3 when I left after the second hot dog.

Well, Gee’s revelation in Wild Woods is that what makes a good world is good people. And therefore, if what you do, say, or post doesn’t make you a better person, it doesn’t make the world a better place. And then I think of how many religious, social, political, scientific, and educational developments were made by people who weren’t good. We had no ‘good people’ running for high office in 2016. We had few if any good people running in 2018. I’m not sure we have any lined up for 2020.

I’ve heard lots of people—in individual conversation and in public forums—declare their anger, resistance, beliefs, grief, and commitments. They do so under the banner of free speech. “I should be able to say whatever I want to.” But I look at memes like the one above and think, “If I repost this, will it make me a better person?” For Gee the issue was much bigger, of course, because he’s the main character in a 120,000-word novel.

Wild Woods will be released June 23, 2019. Watch for news and information on the party location!

For me, it is often just, “If I say this and just rip this SOB to shreds for his stupidity, will it make me a better person?” I’m learning (slowly) to shut up.

I don't even start my truck more than once a week and that is usually to go to the post office or to get propane or groceries. I lead a quiet and almost reclusive life.

One of the places Q and I missed when she visited in December was the Blythe Intaglios, giant figures etched in the desert floor by unknown people hundreds of years ago. Friday, I decided to take a little trip up to Parker, AZ for groceries and then cross the Colorado River into California and go see the giant figures.

I’d driven past this site a few years ago and never even noticed it was there. The big roadside marker that is supposed to indicate a historic site has been damaged and never repaired.

What I found was a lonely stretch of dirt road through the desert that led to some impressive sites. Geoglyphs are a rare cultural resource that occur in different countries, including Peru, Chile, England, and Australia. This is the only site of its kind in the US.

These are not down in canyons where you can look over the edge and see the whole thing from above and I’m not rich enough to hire a helicopter to fly me over them. But walking around this 103' long figure of a human was impressive. And fortunately, there were still signs that help identify them.

I saw half a dozen of these giant figures during my visit to a wild and barren land. But the weather the past few weeks has been uncommonly wet and rainy. As a result, it is in bloom wherever you go, including near the intaglios.

I made my way back home, filled with curiosity about the people who had come before and wondered what they had done to make the world a better place. And did they succeed?

Now here is good news for fans of my cyber mysteries, For Money or Mayhem and For Blood or Money. Both of you! I’m in the process of rewriting a sequel to the latter that picks up just before the final chapter of For Blood or Money. Just before? Municipal Blondes continues the story from the perspective of Dag’s partner, Deb Riley. She’s in trouble almost from the beginning as she attempts to unravel the clues that Dag has left as she investigates the strange goings-on at the Condo and with Dag’s ex-wife, the Muffin-Top.

I’ll be releasing Municipal Blondes later this summer. The writing never ends! Perhaps something I say or do will make me a better person.

You can support the effort by subscribing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=11237246. My patrons get to read all my books before they are released to the public!