It is Finished, But I am Still Here

CUE: Medium shot of old man scowling. The old man is in his seventies, dark complexion, possibly Italian, wispy white hair. Powerful looking forearms and shoulders---a craftsman. He is in a dark workshop, sitting forward on a chair. He looks around the room and then directly at the camera.

OLD CRAFTSMAN: It is finished, but I am still here.

I have finished the book about my travels and vanlife. Not, The American Outback, Volume One which will be out on April 3rd, the sequel to it. I wrote 250 pages breaking it down into fourteen “legs” covering 30,000 miles, eight months, and an equal number of states. I stopped because how many times do you want to read about me battling bugs or eating salami on Triscuits, or drinking whiskey? How many times do you want to read about me marveling at rocks or struggling to find a place to relieve myself?

The repetition was weakening the story so I ended it.

It is finished, but I am still here.

I am out in a warm desert though it hasn’t been so warm today: Wind. A burst of rain. The smell of precipitation in the desert is something to savor. Most days, you can feel spring getting closer: The lows are now in the high 40s. Lizards on rocks meaning snakes will soon emerge. Each day I go through my morning routines, write or edit for three or four hours, take a long hike, eat, marvel at another beautiful sunset, and then read and drink in the evening hours. The book is finished but I write in a journal every morning; it has been a habit of mine too long to ever stop.

I am editing all the books I have finished. Starting in April, I will release a book every three or four months until they’re all out there. Why? Why not? As I wrote in an earlier blog I have given up on finding an editor or an agent. This gives me a lot of freedom, and what I choose to do with that freedom is just put books out there---if you find them you find them, however many of you that is. I am not a marketing guru nor do I have any interest in being one. This stubbornness may keep the sales of my books in the single digits but I am not capable of anything else at this moment.

If you would like to read one of my books, by the way, you can find them here:

https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B00EG7OKUY

It is finished, but I am still here.

The Craftsman looks unsure, he turns and looks at the tools on his bench. They are carefully placed, within reach. The location of each something he had changed over the years. It is the same in Pandette, my 2010 Honda Odyssey I ripped everything behind the driver seat out of---everything, down to the brackets that would anchor the seats. This will never be a passenger van again, there is no going back---

That’s an important point, let’s hit it again:

There is no going back.

I will not go back to my old life, I will live (extremely) modestly, I will travel, and I will not have what people might call “security.” But I will still thrive---I will live life and write about my experiences…

And I would love to share them with you.

Izk