Finally, I am a published author.
Over the weekend I finished up the novel I was working on. Actually, it turned out to be only a novella, as it’s only about 28,000 words, but it turned out pretty well and I don’t want to write a bunch of extra stuff just to make it longer.
It is simply titled Grunch Road and it’s based on an old ghost story that was popular when I was going to school. It’s set in 1971, before Facebook and even before personal computers. It’s set in New Orleans East, where I grew up, and features a lot of locations people who grew up there will remember. Like Lincoln Beach (pictured below), where the “colored people” hung out in the days before desegregation, and my old high school, which – sadly – had to be torn down after Hurricane Katrina. There’s also the titular location, which was an old service road out in the wetlands that were still being developed. Since then a residential neighborhood has been built there, though it got trashed by Hurricane Katrina.
Writing the story was a lot like traveling through time. As I already pointed out, we didn’t have Facebook or even PC’s. During the time frame of the story – the last two weeks of October 1971 – Bill Gates would have just been turning 16. It was also a world where it was legal to drink at 18 and 9/11 was just another day in September.
My main character, Nick “Iceman” Eismann, isn’t based on me. Actually I modeled his physical description after another guy from New Orleans I know who I won’t name here, except that I gave him cold gray eyes people can’t stand to look at. His eyes figure prominently into the story, especially during the climax. They seem to reinforce his “Iceman” nickname, but the name really comes from the fact that it’s phonetically close to his last name, and in fact his last name is German for Ice Man.
Probably the hardest part of writing my main character is that he’s straight. He does kiss a boy during the course of the narrative, but not for reasons you might be thinking. (You’ll just have to write the book to find out why.) In order to appeal to a more mainstream audience, he “gets the girl” in the end. Eww. I had to take a shower after writing those parts of the book.
While my main character is completely fictitious (except he writes for the school newspaper, like I did in high school) there is a minor character in the book based on me. Nick has a ten-year-old little brother based on me. (That’s about how old I was when these events take place.)
Right now it exists in three formats: as a straight HTML file you can just read in your browser, as a PDF with cover art and everything, and as a Kindle book. That’s the neat new thing I learned this week: how to make Kindle books. As for Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the PDF version should work with that.
You can download the book here, and there are links in the right hand sidebar. I’d love to submit it to Amazon, but first I have to get an ISBN number for it, and that costs about a hundred bucks per version. (I’ll need a separate one for the Kindle version and the PDF version.)
I hope you’ll read it, and let me know what you think.
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