A Cat in Sancerre is Launching!

Finally! I am launching A Cat in Sancerre

Hi everyone!

I have to apologize for going silent for so long - life has been a bit full!

Since we last met here I’ve spent a month in France, spent months trying to figure out the best path for moving to France, had my car wrecked by an uninsured teen, had a minor surgery and have been in the middle of renovating our home.

If you watched any of the videos I shared, you know that Rachel and I are looking into starting an art / writing / cooking residency in France. After a lot of research, we pushed the date back a year, so we will be in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. But we are both super excited about the project, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about it in a future post. Our working name is Rossignol Retreats or Nightingale Retreats (same bird, different languages 🙂). I would very much like to arrange a retreat for this coming year–ideally a writing retreat, but I’m open to hearing what people might be interested in. My thoughts on retreats include the idea of having a strong focus on what I’m thinking of as “creative health.”

But in the meantime, I am getting ready to release A Cat in Sancerre, and I want my Substack community to have a first look at it.

In the next few days I am launching A Cat in Sancerre with a Kickstarter. I am crowdfunding the launch so that I can have interesting perks to go along with the book, and so I can build community with my readers.

In my next post I’m going to share the first ten pages of the book, which I’ll also link to the Kickstarter. It’s taken a long time to get this going, but I’m excited about it. Everyone who has read A Cat in Sancerre has loved it, and I hope that this first part gets you wanting to read more.

Once I launch the book, I hope to have time to get back to writing more often. I’ve already started a sequel to the book, and I have a ton of things that I’ve been wanting to write about here.

Leading up to launching A Cat in Sancerre, I am posting photos from some of the experiences that inspired parts of the book. Mostly I post on Facebook and Instagram, but I’ll end this newsletter with a link to a Substack post I did the other day with some images from my trip through the Himalayas by motorcycle–one of the experiences that became a part of A Cat in Sancerre.

All the best to everyone out there. I hope you are all doing well in this world of insanity that we are living in. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

- Nelson

PS: This was one of my favorite photos from that post below. This man was one of the many monks I met and spent time with when I was in the Himalayas (I also met the Dalai Llama, but that’s another story). The monks of Ladakh and Tibet are a truly wonderful community–educated, funny (sometimes hilarious), and far less serious than you might imagine. As I said to one friend recently, they seem to walk very lightly through life.

Ladakh monk dancing in the monastery at Llamayuru