The novel you are about to read is a work in progress. What I am posting here is the raw, unedited draft – complete with typos and mistakes… The finished project will be vastly different. I started this project in 2011 and I stopped working on it abruptly to let it cook for a while…
While I’m writing a much better version, you can read the old draft while the new one is being completed. Essentially, you get to read a version free, and if you liked what you read, you can purchase the complete polished version from book retailers everywhere.
I began writing this before I wrote and published my first book. The writing is far from my best… but there’s a story here, kids. The title is a working title. And again, I stress this is a very rough draft, cringeworthy (at least to me) to read in some places, but I thought this would be a fun way for you to read a developing work, and then read a finished product.
Enjoy...
Chapter One
When the ice shifted in the cup he realized he didn’t miss her anymore. So he swirled the tequila and lime juice in the bottom of the cup and drank it down. It tasted like comfort. So did cigarettes. And the afterglow of melancholy felt comforting too. And the wind crashing against the side of the house sounded reassuring.
It was cold on the beach; the coldest winter in Rockford since he’d lived there. It was cold in the house, the temperature hovering at sixty degrees. It was expensive to heat, and the loss of income stemming from the separation prevented him from turning the thermostat up. She would have hated that. She hated the cold. But he liked it, and so did the cat. She would have hated that the house wasn’t clean. She would have hated that he wasn’t in bed, and the pile of clothing on the bedroom floor, and the new location of the litter box, and the fact that he’d been eating from plastic and paper products for months, and that he had stopped going outside to smoke now that it was winter, and that he had stopped missing her. There were so many things for her to hate now that she was gone. It made him wonder why she left before there was so much to hate.
Mason left the pile of half graded papers in the den to stare out the window in the sitting room. The view was white moonlit sand and an angry black ocean. And it looked beautiful for the first time in ages. The profound simplicity of newness, the realization that all was not lost, the thought of going to sleep without feeling desperate and the idea of beginning and not ending made him feel comfortably tired instead of emotionally exhausted. It was time to go to bed. Tonight he would sleep peacefully. If he continued to grade papers, he’d keep smoking. If he stayed up, he’d keep drinking. If he continued to look out the enormous window in the sitting room, the sun would come up. If he saw the sun come up, he’d sleep past noon. Christmas break was almost over, and he needed to reset his sleep cycle before the weekend or the first day back to school would be torture.
The sound of sirens drew him to the front of the house. The kitchen lit up with blue and red flashes as the squad car and ambulance passed. They were heading north on Breakwater Boulevard. He lit a cigarette like he always did when he decided it was time to go to bed. And because he lit a cigarette, he poured a little more tequila into the red cup. Returning to the den, he caught a glimpse of his un-showered self in the hallway mirror. His hair was sticking out, matted in other places. In his green and yellow checkered pajama bottoms, thermal shirt, cardigan sweater and wool socks, he looked old. His body felt old. His attitude hadn’t aged: perhaps even regressed a little. Even with the sobering realization that if he lived to be seventy his life was well past half over, it felt like there was a lifetime of possibility ahead of him.
