Before the Coffee… ^Chronicles Spills
July has been a weird month. This is easily reflected in my post schedule.
The Mammoth Cave book is slowly making its way through the last steps of the pre-release process.
The Dry Tortugas book was finally accepted by the Florida National Parks Association. (Check out the new link on the home page to buy it directly from the Florida National Parks Association’s Website. It not only helps me, but a portion of every sale goes to support National Parks.)
In related news, you can also now find Treasure off the Coast in the Ernest F. Coe visitor center in the Everglades, and in the Visitor Center inside Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas! Go to the park and take home a souvenir and a story!
Now this can be you! Pick up the book in the Fort Jefferson Book Store, and see if you can find the arch which most closely matches the cover! (stay a safe distance from the edge! there are Cassiopea in the moat.) Also, sorry for the bad lighting.
This was always the goal with the Junior Rangers Investigative Club Series: get them into National Park Bookstores, so readers have another way of exploring and visiting some really cool national parks, and can take away a small piece of the park in the form of stories. If I’ve done my job right, the mysteries which Justin, Lucy, Bethany, and the others encounter are fun to solve, and also educational.
I also want to make sure that the books will be available to everyone else. It’s not always easy to get to national parks. Dry Tortugas requires a boat ride, or catching a seaplane. The commercial trips fill up early, and it’s a long ride if you choose to rent or take your own. Mammoth Cave is much more accessible, if you are traveling to or through, (or live in,) South Central Kentucky.
Both of these parks, (along with those I will feature in future stories) deserve to been seen and to have their stories shared, even if you aren’t able to make your way physically to the parks. Especially, as I expand to more and more parks, I recognize that it will be challenging to keep up with the Junior Rangers Investigative Club as they traipse around the country. So the books will always be available online too. Still, it is awesome to see the books properly representing their intended parks! And if you end up visiting Dry Tortugas, the Everglades, or (soonish) Mammoth Cave. I hope you look for the books there. Or that you find the books before you head out to visit these parks.
If I’ve done my job write (<— purposeful pun) then you should be able to recognize many of the places in the book from thier real world locations.
Ok. This was an overdue reflection on a few things I’ve been working towards this month. (with help. oh so much help)
But there is one more thing that I wanted to celebrate before the month is out. The first season of Coffee Chronicles, is coming to an End!
Coffee Chronicles is a long running series about a boy who drinks coffee, a silly alien, a barista, and an increasingly ridiculous cast as they try to save the Universe from an Evil Figure trying to end it.
I write Coffee Chronicles mostly to entertain myself, *(hopefully it will accidentally also entertain some readers,) I started it almost exatly 20 years ago. Set it down for a long time, picked it back up again, and then forced myself to publish it on Kindle Vella for one reason, and one reason only: To finally finish Season 1.
Is it perfect? No. Is Kindle Vella the best platform for it? I don’t know. (I do like the ability to release Coffee Chronicles Episodically, because I’d always imagined it that way.) But did I finally complete one of the most fun, but most challenging to end projects I have ever attempted to create? Sort of… I actually think Coffee Chronicles would be amazing with more visual elements and less wordy descriptions.
For the first time, however, the Plot of Season 1 has run its course! And I am so, so happy to have finally completed it, plus I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. So if you want a silly story about aliens, coffee, and extra dimensions, there has never been a better time to check it out! Coffee Chronicles Episode 1 on Vella
So I have a lot of things to celebrate this month, despite a lot of weirdness too. And to get the 3rd book ready, I have so much work to do… like writing the rest of it. So I’m going to get back to that! July is almost over, August is coming, and there will be more milestones ahead.
Prepare for more geology, more rambling, and hopefully a lot of other fun stuff. I hope that things are going well for all of you, as well!