Finally Able to Breathe and Focus

I always get a little excited around this time of year. It isn’t specifically Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas that starts my jets. It’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November.

This year will be my sixteenth consecutive year of doing NaNoWriMo with a successful completion every year. A win in this game means that I wrote 50,000 words in each NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy. What doesn’t show in this graphic are the multiple times I wrote more than one project in a given event. It only counts one project per event. Nor does it show that I've written nearly as many books between events as during! Under the names Nathan Everett and Devon Layne, I now have over 30 titles available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and may have a dozen more only available through my websites or online serialization.

I’m excited about my new project that I’ll start on November 1—probably a few minutes after midnight. My difficulty at the moment is that I haven’t decided whether this book will be published under the name Nathan Everett or if it will be under the name Devon Layne. It could go either way!

The project is titled American Royalty 1: Coming of Age. I’ve conceived this as the first of a trilogy that will include Coming to Power and Coming to Grips. I’ve been doing some planning and here is what I’ve come up with as a logline:

In an American society based on class distinctions, someone still needs to teach the heir apparent how to behave like royalty.

I’m currently classifying this as literary fiction: character driven, exposing a world slightly different than our own, but not beyond our imagining. So far, preparing for the November 1 start date, I’ve written about 2400 words in my planning document. The rough draft will be exposed to my $10/month patrons for either author. The Nathan Everett Patreon page is at https://www.patreon.com/NathanEverett.

I anticipate that development of this project will continue through at least December and that I will then begin immediately on book 2.

You might have noticed I’m a little more upbeat and am back to talking about writing with some enthusiasm. I want to thank you all for your good wishes and encouragement as I went through a low-point in my health this summer and early fall. My health has returned to something approaching normal. I’m sleeping well, eating well, and am able to focus on projects again. My cardioversion on October 1 was successful and I then went on a two-week intensive program for eliminating all the water that had settled in my ankles and lungs. Once I’d dropped twenty pounds of water weight in those two weeks, I stopped coughing and began sleeping again.

I still have a procedure to go through on November 4 when my cardiologist will perform an ablation, stabilizing my heart back in its normal rhythm. With luck, I plan to be back on the road by mid-November! I have two tentative routes planned out as I head south. Some of it will depend on how severe the weather has been in the mountains. I’ll be watching several factors that will affect this.

So, that is why I am now able to focus on a new writing project and will be going for my next ‘win’ in NaNoWriMo!