ebook Archives - Nadine Walks

Taking a quick break from Primitivo posts (more coming this week, so stay tuned!) to share a little book of essays that I’ve just released!

The collection is called ‘A Single Step; Stories of Walking and Wandering’ and it’s available as a PDF Digital Download. 73 pages of walking and travel stories (and photos, too)! Lots of good Camino stuff, but there are also reflections on the pandemic, a glimpse into my study abroad year in Toulouse when I was 20, a road trip adventure, and more.

I’d been working on these essays over the last year, and sharing one a month over on Patreon (a site where you can support my writing/travel stories). Patrons have already had access to many of these essays, and received a free digital copy of the book. But I wanted to make it available more widely as well, and I’m pleased to be able to share it with you today!

I started out just writing somewhat randomly about my travels and my long walks, but I noticed that certain themes were emerging: coming of age and growing older and growing up. Finding confidence, comfort in my own skin. Searching for a place in the world.

If you’ve been a longtime follower (or even recent follower), if you’ve enjoyed my posts and stories about my long walks, then I think you will enjoy these essays. I’ve set a suggested price of $8.00 for the book, but it was important to me to make these essays financially accessible, so there’s a ‘pay what you wish’ option, which lets you choose any price $1.00 or up. And any price is okay! The goal is for these essays to find their way to the readers who might enjoy them, and I think some of you here are part of that audience.

Writing these essays was (mostly) fun. A year ago I was heading into a school year filled with so many unknowns, so much tension and anxiety, so many challenges and I knew that it could be really easy to lose focus and to lose the discipline of a writing practice. I set a very modest goal of writing one essay a month and mostly stuck to it, and I’m happy with some of the words I put together in that time. I look through these essays and am so grateful for the traveling and adventures I’ve been able to have, and I can see how there is still so much room to continue to challenge myself, so many places to explore, more paths to walk, more growing up to do.

Here’s the link for access to the book, if this seems like something you’re interested in, I hope you’ll take a look!

Hi everyone, I’ve written an E-book! It’s called ‘After the Camino’!

Here it is, for your viewing/reading pleasure (click this link, or any of the links in this post). I’ve been calling it a ‘small’ and ‘simple’ thing, though when all was said and done it clocked in at a little over 50 pages. Some of those pages are photos and there’s much less text per page than what I’m used to, so 50 pages feels much bigger than it actually is.

Despite this, ‘After the Camino’ is a book, and I’d love for you to take a look. The chapters read like blog posts, so in a way it feels a bit like a collection of blog posts, with a focus on tips for dealing with the ‘post Camino blues’. Its ideal audience is anyone who has walked a Camino and has returned home and felt a bit lost, or felt like they weren’t sure what to do next.

But in some ways, I think it can be for anyone who has had a big experience and is transitioning back to regular life, and feeling like something is now missing. Most of the content is framed around a Camino experience, but the concepts can be applied to nearly anything. In any case, the book is free, so I think you should all take a look, pilgrim or not! (And if you’re in the planning stages of a pilgrimage, then bookmark this page and come back when you’ve returned from your Camino. This book might help).

Writing this and putting it together was a good experience for me. It never felt overwhelming, and maybe that’s because I worked in stages, and with small steps (like I usually do). I wrote most of it back in the spring, added a few chapters this summer, and have spent the last couple of months tinkering away at putting it together in an e-book format. There was a lot to learn there, and still more to go, I’m sure.

I could have toyed with this for another two months but have you ever heard the expression ‘begin before you’re ready?’. Hmm, well, I’m not sure that this was the expression I was looking for… but in any case the idea was that I may have never felt ready to hit publish and send it out into the great unknown. I needed to finally say to myself ‘good enough’ and then just take the next step.

Here are a couple technical details: if you want to download the book, you’re going to have to submit your email to essentially ‘subscribe’ to the book. There are a couple emails involved here; you’ll have to enter your email and name, then confirm, wait a few minutes (this is key… just wait for it, the email will eventually arrive), and THEN you’ll get the email with the link to the book.

I wish this process could be smoother and less complicated, but it’s what I’ve got for now. Doing it in this way is important to me because it gives me a sense of how many of you are interested in taking a look at the book. As I’ve mentioned before, I have other ideas for projects around this ‘After the Camino’ idea, and am thinking about developing an e-course. But in order to invest a lot of time into that, I want to have a sense of the level of interest.

So, happy reading, and the next time you’ll hear from me here will hopefully be soon, with my final blog post from the Chemin du Puy.