You can read it free here. I posted the link and the paywalled text to my paid subscribers, but I have relatively few of them so I’m posting again without the paywall. Apologies for the redundancy.
My 10,000 words a day on Kindle Vella goal was, as it turned out, hopelessly unrealistic. I have, however, put about 120,000 words down since I started six weeks ago, and I officially put the Prologue for Book 2: Surviving Toledo, on KDP. That was the last one to have anything published. It’s available here free to read on Vella. I’m going to post it below for paid subscribers
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much of Book 5 was already put together in the form of my dream journaling and top secret posts. Book 4, meanwhile, is a hot mess of drunk messages with my sister in law in 2018 and free style ramblings that I’m having trouble making sense of. It needs a lot of editing.
So for my 7 book series I have Book 1: Travels With Nemo (done and published) Book 2: Surviving Toledo (just the Prologue) Book 3: Shadows of the Summer Solstice (about half is up on KDP but I’m reediting the back half) Book 4: Seven Years Later: A Necromancer Rising (I’m through the first 10 chapters on KDP but hot mess in the back) Book 5 The Last Verse: The Realm of the Dead (Close to halfway on KDP) Book 6 The Secret Marriage (done and published) and Book 7: The Covid Chronicles (through chapter 10 on KDP, but saving the last for last).
I am genuinely thrilled to be putting this out there, and I have a lot of people on substack to thank for it. Book 2 is mostly put together as book 3 is, but I had a lot of pushback from people in my hometown for writing it. Their identities cannot easily be hidden everybody knows who my brother or my high school sweetheart or Beth is. Some of those stories are fundamental to my story and in some cases I think SHOULD be out there (Beth’s story most prominently, as I believe she was a victim of pedophilia that SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED TO HER). She’d prefer to protect her family by keeping it buried. I think the perps should be held accountable.
This started as an inspiration almost 20 years ago to write a travel memoir. That snowballed into, well, the Hottest Gossip About Armadillos, which a lot of people did want to read about. But that came to head with a hostile crowd looking for their name on page 157 and deep discussions about what family secrets and private matters should be kept secret and private. Sometimes I think God wrote my life story for me. There’s no way I could make this up.
Critiques, comments, insights and encouragement are all greatly appreciated. I am planning on putting more of my episodes on here for paid subscribers, but I’m trying to put it into a coherent order. Please consider supporting my work if you have the means to do so. It keeps the animals fed!