I hadn’t expected to write another novel after Brothers of the Milky Way, but the plot essentials of Índigo as much as fell out of the sky in an unusually imaginative spell last December, and I couldn’t resist the challenge of a turnkey story. The writing took eight months. Unimpressed readers may encourage me to resist future such challenges, and to fix the window that the plot essentials fell through. I hope most react more favorably.
Like Brothers, Índigo is set in mid-1970s California. California is where I grew up, where I spent most of my life; California is a place that I can write about credibly with little effort. I hope the story appeals to younger readers with a sentimental interest in the twilight of the hippy era (perhaps especially in the thankfully extinct practice of hitchhiking) and, of course, to fellow Boomers who share the happy characteristic of not being dead yet.
Ironically, sadly, what I hope the novel does not do is encourage anyone without a U.S. passport to book a trip to California anytime soon, given 2025 news stories about sometimes Kafkaesque hassles with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Returning American citizens face these hassles, too; I wouldn’t return to the U.S. now without a burner phone. I suggest waiting for a more tourist-friendly administration, at least if the Trump team ever permits such an administration to win an honest election and take office.
If I write another novel, I hope to set it in Spain. I’d also like to translate this novel into Spanish, but would face a hurdle in translating mid-1970s California slang. I could eliminate the slang, as I’m confident I won’t get in hot water with the author, but at least one chapter would lose significant flavor as a result. I’ll see.
You’ll find the free-to-download .pdf of Índigo at bluetowerpress.com¹, as well as links for those old-schoolers who prefer to buy a three-dimensional paper copy. I will bashfully stump for the paper copy, which turned out better than I had dared hope, thanks to the nearly two hundred year old artistry of ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai. I’m afraid that I can’t stump for the ebook, as it omits font changes that help inform a reader of narrative shifts from third to first person. (The .pdf does include these font changes.) I let IngramSpark handle the ebook conversion this time around, and had to hang a minimum 0.99 price on the ebook to enter it in their retail pipeline.
¹Smarty-pants Linux users can open a terminal window and enter:
wget https://www.bluetowerpress.com/files/indigo.pdf
to download a copy.