Welcome to NatRichmond.com! My first novel, A Place You Can’t Escape, will be released on Amazon on Sept. 9 in paperback and Kindle. (Or is it on Kindle? New technologies should come with assigned prepositions, IMHO.)
Elsewhere on this site, you have probably seen a jacket blurb for the book, a brief excerpt and some reviews, plus some short talking-head videos of me carrying on about its birth. Let’s be honest: Everything is meant to make you rush right over to Amazon and buy it. So is my slightly flummoxed social media presence. (Search Nat Richmond on Facebook and Instagram and you will see what I mean. There aren’t even any photos or videos of me dancing, or my pets – the last one died a few months back – or my most recent batch of guacamole. What’s up with that? BTW, don’t bother with TikTok or The One Formerly Known as Twitter. I haven’t.)
I came to fiction writing after a 15-year career in daily journalism, mostly newspapers (my face and TV didn’t get along), and 29 years as a teacher. There was a first stab at a novel (it wasn’t A Place You Can’t Escape) almost 40 years ago, during a fairly brief window known as graduate school. The summers were slow enough to give me a little breathing room to try to write, but the effort went nowhere. The window closed again when we welcomed – in rapid succession – our first kid, our second kid and our two teaching careers.
I had always made myself a promise, though: I would not die regretting that I had never tried again to write fiction. So when I retired I set out my stall. I haven’t dabbled; I write almost every day, I contact agents futilely, I attend online writers conferences, and after nine years I have five novels in various stages of development. APYCE is the first one to be released into the wild. In subsequent posts I will have more to say about it, and the works that will follow.
For now, thanks for checking the site out. Stay tuned. Cheers.