Process

Over the weekend, I finished my latest short story/novella, with the working title “The Slingshot.” It’s about a 16-year-old geek whose one stupid mistake unravels into some terrible consequences, but its real theme is how important a brother relationship can be, and how it can transcend all sorts of differences, and challenging situations, and family strife, and time itself. Taylor and Michael couldn’t be much more different, but that bond holds them together, and it’s a big part of what I hope makes this story work.

I don’t know what I’ll ultimately do with this story. But, as with all of these shorter works, they’re great for giving me something to work on while other things are happening — like, as with now, my beta readers grinding away at my first novel — and for giving me bite-sized pieces of work that are flexible in how I want to use them, whether it’s giving them away for free on my site (perhaps as an enticement to sign up for my email list I’ll be starting soon), releasing them individually for a low price on Kindle, packaging them together into a collection, sending them off to contests, selling them to anthologies, or some combination of those things. My novels will be my babies, but these little pieces are nice to have, and I hope to pile them up to keep tucked away in my pocket over the coming years.

As for “The Slingshot,” here’s an excerpt from it, to hopefully make you want to read more. This is the first several paragraphs of the story, which I think sets up what happens reasonably well. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments here, or on Facebook, or Twitter, or via Morse code, or just yell really loudly, or whatever. Enjoy.

I was fifteen when I killed that girl who lived up the street. That was so unlike me. I’d never been in trouble a day in my life. I was a Straight-A student, got perfect attendance almost every year—okay, the flu bug did hit me on occasion, but I tried to work through it anyway—and was on the Honors track for college in a few more years. I had everything any good parents would want for their kid.

What I didn’t have, though, was a lot of friends. Let’s say I was awkward. My head was far more likely to be buried in a book than a football helmet. That kid who always got picked last whenever they line up to form teams for kickball or touch football at recess during elementary school? That was me. I threw “like a girl,” I was constantly told—but I could think of at least a dozen girls on the playground who could out-throw me. I kicked with the grace of a drunk fraternity guy with his feet tied together, and I ran like an octopus falling out of a tree.

It didn’t help that I wore glasses—not just glasses, but big black ones that looked like hand-me-downs from my sixty-year-old uncle, because they were hand-me-downs from my sixty-year-old uncle—and had braces from second all the way through eighth grade. As those years dragged on, I could barely remember ever not having braces. As far as I was concerned, I’d been born with those godforsaken sharp, metal brackets all over my teeth, and I wouldn’t get them off until the President himself issued a direct order to remove them, under threat of military invasion.

I lived in constant jealousy of my older brother, Michael, who was a god among men at eighteen years old then. He started at linebacker for the high school football team—or, well, he did until he busted up some guy’s face in a fight outside a Taco Bell at 2 a.m. and got arrested. He wore a letterman’s jacket. He smoked cigarettes, and made it look like James Dean. He had girlfriends. And real, actual friends. People who called our phone at the house and asked for him, to the point that my parents gave him his own line so he wouldn’t tie up the home phone. Nobody had a cell phone in 1992, but my brother had a beeper, which I thought was unspeakably cool. I suppose I could have gotten one too, but the only thing more pathetic than not needing a beeper was getting one and then never having anyone but your mom call it. Besides, I was never anywhere other than school and home, so what did I need one of those for? If anyone wanted to find me, it was a 50/50 shot on where to check.

I was the easy one, and my mom fawned over me because of it. I cringed whenever she asked Michael why he couldn’t be more like me, and they’d yell back and forth over it. It was like my mom was using me as a shield to hold up between her and Michael, trying to deflect his bad behavior off of her by citing her “good son.” How bad could she have done as a mother if she had this one studious, well-behaved, dutiful son reading a book upstairs right now? Sure, Michael reeked of cigarette smoke, and may or may not have impregnated some girl at school, and probably stole that watch he was wearing, but that wasn’t her fault because she raised me too. Michael probably got his rebellious genes from his dad, who none of us had seen in ten years at that point. Had that sent Michael down the path he was on? It was tough to say; he was only seven when the divorce happened. Not a lot of seven year olds had a pack-a-day habit or a rap sheet. Maybe his adolescence would have led to the same place regardless, or maybe having a good male influence in the home would have given him a better direction to head in. Who knows?

Whether you love it, hate it, want to read more, or want to throw it in a fire, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave them any of the myriad places you can reach me, including in the comments below. Thanks for reading.