Quick note! My next science-fiction book has been fully submitted for publication and is officially on the way! Release date: October 17th. Catch up on the series here. On October 1st I will be putting ALL the current books in the series on 10% discount through October 31st to celebrate the release of PURNELL, Book 5 of 9 in the series.
Before I begin… HAPPY FIRST DAY OF AUTUMN! Earth’s poles are currently pointing parallel to its orbit around the Sun, marking the official geometric turn-of-season.
Why I chose Prescott National Forest
Watch the 60-second YouTube short I created in conjunction with this post
After leaving Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks (Sequoia post will be another time, I promise!), I returned to Phoenix for a quick stopover with my friends. It was coming up on Chris’ birthday, so he had invited a group of friends and families from around the state who ride One-Wheels together and had more than a dozen people show up for a camping weekend in Prescott National Forest near Thumb Butte.
He and I went up on Thursday night (September 11th) to get a campground that could fit everyone. It took a solid SIX HOURS driving around in the dark on rough terrain to get a spot that wasn’t taken. I kept scouting ahead in my definitely-meant-for-offroad van so that he wouldn’t have to take their camper trailer down into some of these tighter areas. At one point, my van kept spinning out on the steep uphill return trip, to the point of rolling back downhill in some spots.
A wonderful way to spend 11:15pm on a Thursday night.
Yes, I absolutely thought he was going to have to detach the camper and come rescue me with a winch. But even in a definitely-meant-for-offroad van, I’m crafty, and slowly but surely managed to ascend back to the main road where he was waiting for me.
Hungry and deposed, we routed to the Prescott Applebee’s and had dinner, did some TV trivia, and then got back to it. The thought was, if the set of camps were taken, we’d reluctantly go up to Flagstaff.
One Last Try
Up another side of another mountain, and lo-and-behold, we happened across a campground that had multiple empty sites. At the very back in the largest camp area was a couple in a jeep, and my friend and I probably looked sketchy as heck as we investigated, at 12:30am, how far back the camp area went, shining our flashlights around not initially realizing these people were there.
But this was it. We set up my friend’s camper (another ordeal in itself, leveling and all), and at the ripe hour of 1:45am, finally went to bed.
The weekend passed with games, ice cream cake, hiking, and other good times. When everyone left on Sunday afternoon, I went for a quick shopping trip, then went deeper into Prescott National Forest to isolate myself. I found a campsite about 15 miles outside of town and hunkered down for the next five days.
Back to being On My Own
Outside of the 6.5 mile roundtrip hike to the top of Mount Union and some smaller hikes around the mountainside in my immediate area, I used these days alone as a writing retreat.
I finished up the final edits of my next book, the eighth I’ve ever written, but the 5th in my current sci-fi series. From there, I spent a day proofreading and finalizing my beta editors’ edits, then formatted the book (a whole huge technical process that takes nearly a full workday each time I do this) down to the literal space between page numbers and the bottom line of each page.
Then I wrote the afterword and acknowledgements.
Then I updated the map of Belvun, the planet where Books 4-6 take place.
On my final day in PNF, there was a thunderstorm with lots of lightning and even hail, precipitation that I literally haven’t seen in more than a decade! But it was a proper thunderstorm, with thunder rolling around for hours–a far cry from the in-and-out storms I experienced while living in Florida for years.
On my final morning, I topped off my solar, filmed a few quick videos about the partial solar eclipse in New Zealand, and the autumnal equinox, and then went to leave.
Uh-Oh…Sike.
I hadn’t turned on my van in nearly five straight days, but I’d used the lights each night. So the battery was shot. Again (because I sometimes forget to unplug the bigger batteries after driving for hours!)
It WOULD be a terrible situation: 15 miles from town, totally alone with a car that won’t start. But prior to leaving Florida in May, I added solar jumping cables to my Jackery collection. This is the…third? fourth?…time I’ve had to use them. And the second time I was in the middle of absolutely nowhere when this happened!
Connect to the car battery, plug into the solar battery (not the solar panels), and wait 10 minutes.
Boom.
On the road again.
There will come a day that absentmindedly draining the car battery will not be the issue, and it’s not going to be a good day. But it was not this day.
Back to Sedona Via Jerome
Nine days, a little more than five of them on my own, isolated in a part of the forest where the world is silent and there is only the chatter of insects at night, and my favorite sound in the world: the high-altitude wind in the trees, a ghostly howl that travels miles and miles…
I wound my way through Prescott then headed back into the mountains on the northeastern side of the region, stopping to take pictures and fly the drone at some pretty epic overlooks. Video coming to YouTube soon.
Then I entered Jerome, a historic town built right into the side of the mountain with treacherous winding cliffside roads. But the town was packed with tourists.
Down into Cottonwood, then follow 89A north.
I’m back in Sedona now to host 3-4 weeks of astronomy. I’ll be here at least through October 14th since my stock of PURNELL will arrive that day. Shortly after, I’ll take off for Colorado and Montana in an effort to outpace winter, swing back to the PNW, and then drive the Pacific Coast from Cape Disappointment in Washington all the way back to San Diego.
It’s going to be quite an adventure ahead.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
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