Help Me Title My Next Novel (And a Sneak Peek at the Plot!)
An exclusive look at my upcoming fiction series about lost things, found family, and the global nomad community—plus your chance to vote on the official title.
I’m thrilled you’ve joined my paid subscribers and have an interest in my next book. This one is fiction. I’ll be releasing it as a series here on Substack, first, and then after feedback and edits, it will release as a book on Amazon.
Below, I’ll ask you to vote on a title for the book. The title is not UNTITLED.
Here is the draft of the marketing piece for the book. Vote below.
UNTITLED A Novel — Based on a True Story
When Kelly leaves her Kindle on a bus in Bucharest, she has two problems. The first is practical: 733 irreplaceable notes for the travel memoir she has been writing for five years. The second is something she doesn’t yet understand: she has just set eleven lives in motion.
Through the Nomad Life Facebook group — a community of full-time travelers scattered across the globe — Kelly launches a relay. City by city, stranger by stranger, the device makes its way back to her across Europe. And as it passes through each pair of hands, it carries more than Kelly’s notes. It carries the weight of every life it touches.
There’s Marcus, a retired coach from Fresno who has been composing limericks since his wedding day and has traveled to Ireland specifically to read one to people who will understand. His wife Leenie, who has researched every detail of their nomadic retirement, is quietly terrified it won’t be enough for him and them.
There’s Grazia, a Cuban-American engineer who left Havana at the age of five on an Operation Pedro Pan flight and has spent sixty years searching. And Dave, twenty-seven years sober, riding a Harley through Slovakia looking for the farmhouse in a photograph he found in his dead mother’s bedside drawer.
There’s George, a Mexican-American widower making a Beatles pilgrimage through Liverpool, who knows he is really saying goodbye to the woman he lost and a father he never thanked.
And Ari, a former film production executive and LGTBQI advocate who has spent three years in European archives searching for the great-aunt her family has refused to name for eighty years. Plus there’s RJ, who finds connection with Ari across generations of queer pride.
And there’s Connor — an Irish history teacher who left County Limerick at thirteen and has not been back in forty-five years. And his high school sweetheart Colleen, who needs to return to Ireland to find the family she didn’t know she had.
All of them are heading, without knowing it, toward a pub in Croom, County Limerick. Toward a stage. Toward each other. Toward the things they have been carrying across borders for decades.
UNTITLED is upmarket ensemble fiction for readers who loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and 84, Charing Cross Road — warm, specific, historically grounded, and deeply researched across eight countries.
Readers of this book have described it as: a book club novel with a traveler’s pace, a love letter to full-time travel, a story about the histories we inherit and the distances we put between ourselves and home.
Perfect for: book clubs, fans of ensemble literary fiction, upmarket women’s fiction readers, travelers, anyone who has ever left something behind they couldn’t replace.
Themes: full-time travel and nomadic life, found family, Cuban diaspora and Operation Pedro Pan, Irish history and the Great Hunger, LGBTQ+ history and the Nazi occupation of Jersey, sobriety and recovery, grief and forgiveness, genealogy, music and memory, the Beatles.
Based on a true story.
Thanks for getting this far! Now, let’s vote on the Title of this book/series. Paid subscribers get to vote below.
