Sixty: Sixty stories from sixty years

by Nigel Thompson, Elizabeth Thompson (Illustrator)

This is a collection of sixty stories covering my first sixty years as a kid, adult, parent, and part-time experimenter. The stories are in no particular order, being a product of my random memories. They are about me, my kids, my jobs, and the successes, and failures I’ve had along the way. The book covers my time in England where I was born, coming to the US to work for Microsoft, several marriages and divorces, and some experience with home-made rockets and other science projects. It coincidentally ends a little after the time of the Black Forest fire in June 2013 which destroyed our home and almost everything we owned. It wasn’t my idea to write it. I can blame that on my son, who suggested I write down some of the stories I’ve told him. The chapters were written as a part-time hobby in-between writing sci-fi stories. I self-published it as a Kindle book because that is easiest, cheapest, and reduces the chances of a rejection from a publisher to zero. Call me a wimp. I’ve tried to edit it and fix most of the bad grammar and typos, but as any writer will tell you, you can’t generally edit your own work. Call me cheap. There is also some repetition in a few places. This is mostly due to the very long time it took to collect the stories coupled with my advancing senility. If you are an older person, you’ll probably not even notice. I would have liked to have made it free, but Kindle books have a minimum price of $0.99, so you are going to have to part with almost a dollar to read it, or wait for the five days in every 90, when I am allowed to reduce the price to zero for promotional purposes. I make almost $0.35 for every copy sold. Call me a capitalist. I hope you enjoy the stories. I’ve (mostly) enjoyed living them.

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 3, 2015

Reviews

[Joellen Schillaci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, quirky vignettes of one man’s life

This book gives the reader a glimpse of random incidents and themes in the life of a man growing up in England and later as an adult, moving to the USA. It’s a wryly written collection of vignettes rendered with humor, honesty and irony about various areas and phases of his life from early childhood through the near present. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, it’s a telling self portrait.