I'm happy to announce the beginning of another serial tomorrow. I'm serializing my 2013 novel, The Volunteer. This book has been on Amazon in both paperback and eBook for almost as long as I've been on the road. It's already sold all 12 copies it will ever sell. But it was a tale that needed a voice.
The Volunteer is not a story. It's a journey inside the head of a chronically homeless man. It's not a particularly happy book, but its realism shows a sign of hope even in the bleak life of the homeless. The Volunteer is where he is meant to be. It has been divided into ten 'chapters' for posting and display purposes but the original book, published in 2013, had no chapters. This is an online presentation of the original book. No other edits have been or will be made. It is finished.
This journey is not my life, though when my elder sister read the book, she immediately called me and said, "We have to talk. You obviously had a different father than I had." It took a while to convince her that no matter what of our home life and settings she might have recognized, the narrative was fiction, not an autobiography.
Yet, in many ways, it is also the beginning of my journey. In 2013, I set out in a truck and travel trailer to live the life of a nomad author. I have been on the road ever since. I let G2 open the door for me.
My daughter, who loves dark literary fiction, believes this is the best of my novels. I love her anyway.
This is not a story for everyone. If you decide to brave this literary work, I'll look forward to your comments. It's a No Sex Story.
In other news that must be mentioned, both my alter ego, aroslav, and I have been brutalized by what the doctor has chosen so far to term as "asthma." I'm 70 years old and see no reason for asthma to have suddenly developed. X-rays show my lungs are clear. Blood tests show no sign of infection. But none of what the doctor has said explains why I am out of breath when doing a simple task like fixing breakfast or why as soon as I drop off to sleep, I wake up hyperventilating. It doesn't explain why I've lost my appetite, haven't had a glass of wine for a week, and only drink about half a cup of coffee a day. Those are the things I consider indicative of an emergency!
So, I'm in the Seattle area this week, to see my doctor again and try to resolve the issues. It was serious enough that I chose to pay exorbitant airfare from Spokane to Everett Washington rather than drive 350 miles in my sleep-deprived state. It was a good choice. Last night I slept an entire night. I feel almost human again.
The worst side-effect of this physical discomfort is that It has left me unable to concentrate on anything. I've (aroslav) been writing chapter 232 of Double Team (Book 5 of "The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins") for three days and have managed only about 1400 words so far. My average for the year has been in excess of 4,000 words a day. This hits me hard-not that real life is interfering with my writing, but that this imaginary physical limitation is interfering with my real life. I have thousands of words, dozens of stories to tell. I need this lack of breath and sleeplessness to go away.
So that is the status of both aroslav and Wayzgoose. We have separate minds but share the same physical woes.