Notes From The Trenches

Okay…so I’ve been at this indie author thing for about sixteen months now (if we go by the August 2011 publication of my first two novels, Any Red-Blooded Girl and Film at Eleven). And I thought it might be a good time to take a breath and take stock of the indie experience.

I should start by explaining my decision to go indie in the first place. For me, it was an easy choice to make, since the traditional publishing model is fraught with sadness, disappointment and rejection for nearly every aspiring author, regardless of the quality of his/her product. Publishing is a fickle business, and, honestly, I knew without signing up for the ride that the roller coaster wouldn’t be good for my mental health.

And what I really wanted to do was reach READERS anyway!!!! So I hung out my shingle and set up my wares on this magical place called the Internet.

What happened?

The readers came (in ones and twos, mostly, but sometimes in tens and twenties!). I have now sold thousands of e-books (and given away somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000!). I am happy with sales, considering the hyper-competitive book market and the difficulty of reaching one’s audience in such a media-saturated world.

Yet I still get down (so much for bypassing sadness by skipping the traditional publishing route). Writing books is hard; getting those books into the hands of readers who might appreciate them is exponentially harder. I’m not sure I can do any better in that regard than I am right now, which gives the neurotic voice in my head lots of fodder for self-doubt.

And despair.

Some days, I feel like quitting.

But I haven’t yet.

Which brings me to my point: I have begun another novel. Only the first chapter is complete, but I thought I’d post it as I go, like I did with my last book, Good Luck, Fatty?! I hope you enjoy. (For the record, this novel is not yet titled. And it is a first draft.)

Here we go…

chapter 1

If I believed in heaven, I’d be dead right now. Instead, I’m ricocheting around in the back of Ian Smith’s crappy, soundproof van—the Love Machine, as he sickeningly refers to it—like a pinball on LSD.

“Hey, watch it!” I spout as the van hits another beach ball-sized crater in the road. Something heavy with the feel of metal (a giant Maglite flashlight?) bounces off my forehead in the dark. “Ouch!”

Now, in addition to the rug burns that are splashed over my shins and palms from the wall-to-wall Astroturf I’ve been clinging to for the last forty minutes, I’ll be sporting a happy little bruise or a nascent egg over my unkempt, white-blond brows. A fugly third eye.

The van zings around a turn, tossing me into the wheel well and literally rattling Clive’s cage. In retrospect, I probably should’ve thought better of toting a rescue-crow along on a clandestine recovery mission, but Clive is my insurance policy. If my powers go wonky, he’ll be there with his twitchy British accent to save the day.

With a little pinch, I trigger the glow-light of my sports watch. The time is one thirty-three a.m., an hour at which I’m normally curled into the shape of a cinnamon bun beneath an avalanche of blankets and pillows, sleep whistling its way in and out of my nose.

But Ian needs me—or, more specifically, his father needs my gift. And I haven’t spent two years turning into a psychic voodoo princess (seriously, there’s got to be a better way to refer to the extrasensory perception I’ve honed!) to deny a sick old dude my potentially life-saving services.

“We’re almost there,” I whisper to Clive, who’s been abnormally mute since our little quintet slithered out the back exit of New Beginnings, the temporary housing complex where the city has agreed to stash Ian and his dad for the next three months.

Even in the ink-blackness, I can sense Clive doing a peppy little hop around the forest of branches I’ve constructed in his jail cell to lend it a bit more ambience and authenticity. To be honest, I didn’t think the dumb bird was going to last very long after his mate got squashed by a semi-truck and he nearly ended up as bobcat food in a ditch. But now he seems poised for a comeback.

A few silent minutes pass, and then the van makes a series of left-hand turns, followed by a half mile (or so I’m guessing) of low rumbling along a gravel road before meandering to a stop.

I hope this works, I think. Because even though I’ve been sequestered for the better part of an hour, I’m not really in the groove tonight. Usually, sensory deprivation sharpens my skills, but on such a somber anniversary, I only feel empty—in an unproductive sort of way.

The back doors of the van squeak and groan as they inch open on Ian’s mousy profile. For a guy two years my senior—not to mention a senior in high school—he sure has a lot of growing left to do. “You all right?” he asks warily, his gaze hesitant to meet mine.

“You can look at me,” I say with a huff as I scoot toward the moonlight. “I won’t turn you to stone.” I sweep a cross over my chest. “Promise.”

Ian slips past me and clambers into the van, where he gropes around for something. Then a flashlight beam hits my face. “What the heck?” blurts Haley, my wise-mouthed little sister, from the shadows, presumably referring to the obvious whack I’ve taken to the skull.

I shimmy off the tailgate and skid the back of my hand over my forehead. “Job hazard,” I mutter.

“Looks like crap,” Haley says.

While Ian wrestles the metal detector from its cubby hole, I glance from my sister, who is, as usual, clad in black from head to toe (and not just because we’re aiming for ninja stealth), to her Goth-in-training sidekick, Opal. Why did I agree to bring these irritants along again? I think. Oh, yeah: blackmail. “Just get Clive,” I tell Haley. “Opal can hold the divining rod.”

“She’s such a freak,” Haley whispers, a tone of reverence in her voice.

Opal gives a shaky nod that reverberates through her eighty-pound frame. “I know.”

These kids could have worse role models, I figure. The funny thing is, I’m not what they think I am. I’m more a desperate, heartbroken girl clutching at any means possible of contacting the boy she’s lost than an exalted priestess of the occult. But why split hairs?

Haley bangs Clive to a rocky stop at my feet, and he caws a silence-shattering, “Hell-o!”

“Shhh!!!” I spout, giving his cage a little tap with my toes. Because the last thing we need is this nutso bird alerting the neighbors (who may then alert the police) to our technically illegal high jinks. Then again, we’re loitering at the edge of a tree line, a hundred yards away from the camp Ian’s grandparents used to own, in a lakefront community populated largely by seasonal residents who have yet to arrive for the summer. And it’s two o’clock in the morning. So, really, who could possibly hear us?

“Hell-o!” shrieks Clive again.

It’s hard to explain, but this bird and I have a weird case of simpatico. A kinship of grief. “Come on,” I tell him, wiggling my fingers into his cage. He gives my pinkie a little peck. “Be a good boy.”

Ian pops up at my side, the metal detector slung over his shoulder. “Ready?”

I haven’t thought this mission through. Not totally. “I guess,” I say with a shrug. I hate to ask this, since it might call my powers into question, but… “Which way?”

Ian squints into the trees, trains the flashlight on a muddy spot of earth that could be either a rough footpath or the tire tracks of a 4-wheeler, which he heads for as the rest of us traipse raggedly along behind.

“What are we looking for again?” Opal asks as my tennis shoes sink into a mucky pit of dead leaves and storm water.

“Buried treasure,” I whisper. And, for once, I’m not kidding.

In a heavy voice, Ian grumbles, “Slim chance we’re gonna find it, though.”

My feet are so sopping wet that they’re starting to go numb. I shift off the path onto the trailside brush, which scrapes at my ankles as I trudge ahead. “Thanks a bunch,” I say, “for the vote of confidence.”

“Hell-o!” squawks Clive.

“Pipe down, birdbrain,” I mutter.

Opal shoots me a sidelong glance. “Is that all he can say?”

I shake my head. “Uh-uh. He also says yellow and mellow and fellow.” I give her a grin she probably can’t see in the weak glow of the moon. “And a few other choice things.”

In ten more feet, we hit the perimeter of Ian’s grandparents’ former property, where he abruptly stops and the rest of us clatter into each other like runaway train cars. “Sheesh,” I say when Haley slams Clive’s cage into my knee. “Be careful, would ya?”

The air is heavy and storm-charged. Fat raindrops spit sideways at my face. “This is it,” Ian says, motioning at a boarded-up, weather-beaten cabin that, in the dark, reminds me of the haunted houses I’ve seen in ghost stories on TV.

“Any idea where I should start?” I ask.

Ian shrugs. “Under a tree? That’s where it’s supposed to be.”

“What is it? Like bars of gold or something?” says Haley.

I pry the divining rod from Opal’s death grip (who knew someone so tiny could be so strong?) “Something like that,” I tell Haley. “Coffee cans full of…”

Clive ruffles his feathers, making a sound that mimics our cleaning lady, Rosie, shaking out the bed sheets. “Gold coins,” Ian says. “My old man says Uncle Ted buried loads of them here during the Great Depression, even though it was illegal. Even though the government was confiscating them.”

Haley pulls a quizzical face. “So your uncle was a traitor?”

“Great-uncle.”

“Cool,” whispers Opal.

I can’t help rolling my eyes. “I’m freezing,” I say, wrapping my arms around my chest for warmth (and nearly poking Haley’s eye out with the divining rod). “You guys stay here. I’m gonna get started.”

Ian taps me on the shoulder with the Maglite. “Forget something?”

“Oh, yeah. I guess you’re gonna have to come with me,” I reluctantly admit, “so I can see.”

Haley and Opal exchange anxious glances. “What about us?” Haley asks.

“You’ll be fine,” I say. “Clive will protect you.”

Haley snorts. “More like the other way around.”

I take a step and Ian follows…as do Haley, Opal and Clive (but at least they pretend to be sneaky about it).

Now I’m doomed, I think. Because as scattered as my mind is already, I’ve just become the grand marshal of a parade of misfits and oddballs—which gets me thinking of George.

Two years = 24 months = 104 weeks = 730 days = way too many hours, minutes and seconds since I last saw George Alfred Brooks, the only boy I may ever love.

And I never told him.

And now he’s gone.

And it’s my fault.

“Hey, Cass,” I hear Ian saying across what seems a great distance, “you okay?”

Sometimes I go into a trance, and then I have a hard time coming out of it. With effort, I focus my eyes on the tips of my tennis shoes until they’re as clear as the crystal pendant slung around my neck. “Yep,” I report.

Ian shines the flashlight ahead of us toward the base of a thick tree, on which I concentrate intently, the divining rod weightless and alive in my slack grip. Before George died, I thought of myself as ordinary. Simple. Destined for the meaty part of the curve.

But then I found my power—or it found me. “We’re getting warmer,” I say with confidence, the rod humming gently against my fingertips. I conjure the sight of an empty white room, an imaginary place where walls, floor and ceiling meld together, forging a hole of nothingness. The epicenter of my gift.

The rod tugs left around the tree, to a spot equidistant from the mouth of the lake and the cabin’s lopsided screened porch. I stop at this unmarked place, the rod going still and my feet starting to prickle. “Try here,” I tell Ian, who is already firing up the metal detector, its gauges sputtering to life with a series of beeps and clicks.

I step aside and he scans the earth, anticipation thickening the night air. “Do we get a share of…whatever we find?” asks Haley, the metal detector’s chirping intensifying.

“Are you sure there’s no one out here?” I ask, suddenly nervous. Because my Spidey Sense is tingling.

Mice, I think. Or raccoons. Hopefully.

Instead of answering, Ian kicks a clod of dirt from the spotty lawn, carves a rough X in the earth with the heel of his boot and powers the metal detector down. I hold it upright as he goes into his backpack for the shovel, a collapsible number folks keep in the trunks of their cars or the beds of their pickups for snow emergencies in our untamed part of Vermont (though, technically, we’ve now crossed over into New Hampshire).

Ian snaps the shovel into being and takes a thunking stab at the ground.

“Hell-o!” Clive coos, as if he’s wooing a pretty lady.

“That’s it,” I say. Until I need ol’ Clivey—if I need him at all—he’s going undercover.

Despite the rain and even the cold, I unzip my hoodie and slip it off. Then I zip it around Clive’s cage, stretching the fabric until it’s as tense as an overblown balloon. Poor George, I think. Look at what I’ve done to his most cherished possession. With any luck, I’ll be able to shrink the garment back into shape with an overdose of fabric softener and a spin through the dryer on permanent press.

“Can I help?” Opal asks Ian as he chips away at the dirt, one measly shovelful at a time.

“Nah,” he answers. “Maybe when I get tired.”

Opal shrugs, starts marching in place as if she’s the leader of a one-girl band.

“I think I hear something,” I whisper, straining an ear toward the cottage.

But it’s already too late.

“Hold it right there!” a gruff voice demands, stopping my lungs in mid-breath.

I disobey, swivel my head around for the source of the command, notice Haley and Opal stiffening to attention at each other’s sides.

“What do you think you’re doing?” comes the voice again, booming like a conga drum.

“Nothing,” claims Ian, his hands suddenly still, the shovel balanced on the tip of his boot and his gaze fixed on the cottage’s rickety porch.

A bulky figure steps into sight but remains shadowed. “Looks like you’re up to no good.”

We are so up to good! I think. We’re trying to save a sick old man’s life! I risk a step toward the silhouette. “He used to live here,” I say, throwing an elbow at Ian, “in the summers. You know, the Smiths? Maybe you remember them?”

The shadow advances on us. Finally, I make out a guy my father’s age, with a scraggly beard, lips the color of new plums and the coal-black eyes of a snowman. Oh, and a shotgun aimed—generally speaking—at our heads. “’Fraid not,” he mutters.

“We can leave now,” Haley offers, her voice quavering. “It’s no problem.”

Don’t run, Sis, I tell her telepathically. He won’t need any other reason to shoot you.

“Let’s just—” I start to say, but the man interrupts.

“Not until we get a few things straight,” he says, lowering the gun.

My pulse switches from quadruple-time to time and a half. “Like what?” I inquire softly.

It’s muffled, thank God, but Clive lets out a garbled, “Hell-o!”

The man raises his gun again, sidles up to Clive’s cage and pokes at George’s hoodie with the muzzle. “Watcha got here?”

Please don’t let him be a hunter. Please don’t let him be a hunter, I pray. But, of course, he is. I can just tell. “Oh, that’s my bird, Clive,” I explain. “He’s a rescue-crow.”

The shotgun muzzle, by way of the stranger’s unusually long forearms, pries half of George’s hoodie from the cage. “He rescues people?” the man asks with astonishment.

I shouldn’t laugh, but… “Uh, no,” I say with a nervous chuckle. “I rescued him. His mate died in a car accident.”

A curious look comes over the man’s face. “Take him out.”

“I’m cold,” says Opal. When I glance her way, it’s obvious that she’s serious, her bony little body now racked by an all-out shake.

Ian looks at Opal too. “We’ve gotta get going,” he says, sounding as if he’s trying to talk himself into the idea.

“Take him out,” the man says again.

Don’t kill my bird, I want to say. He didn’t do anything to you. But instead I fidget with the zipper of George’s hoodie until it comes loose; then I unlatch Clive’s cage and shove my hand inside. “Here, baby.”

The bird doesn’t know any better. He really doesn’t. I feel the soft pinch of his claws on my wrist and the heft of his body balanced over my hand. “Okay…” I say as I withdraw my arm, “…here we go.”

Clive flutters his wings, tosses his head from side to side. The man simply stares. “He bite?” he asks, nodding Clive’s way.

I shrug. “He might,” I admit, not wanting to hold out false hope. “Not usually, though.  He’s pretty well tamed.”

The stranger cocks his head, moves in on Clive and me. The birdbrain cocks his head right back. “Mind if I pet him?”

Of course, I mind. “I dunno,” I say. “I guess you can if you want.”

Haley pipes up. “I wouldn’t.” I shoot her a stifling glare, but it doesn’t take. “I mean, sure, he’s cool and everything,” she goes on, “but for all we know, he could have SARS or something. It’s not like we’ve had him tested.”

The man rests his shotgun on the ground beside the metal detector, which I’ve long since abandoned. “I ain’t too worried about it.” He reaches a thick, grungy hand—replete with gruesome nicks and scrapes, calluses and rope-like scars—at Clive’s face.

I swear to God, if this weirdo snaps my bird’s neck or bites his head off like that sicko Ozzy Osbourne used to do (not to Clive, obviously, but to his feathered friends), I’m going to lose my marbles. “Go slow,” I can’t help cautioning as his fingers make contact with Clive’s back, “and be gentle.”

My words of warning are unnecessary, though, because the man pets my bird with the delicacy of a chef trying to crack an egg without breaching its yolk. “Good birdie,” he whispers.

I can’t believe my eyes when Clive takes a dancing leap from my hand to the stranger’s.

And neither can Haley. “Wow,” she says, “he’s never done that.”

What my sister means it that Clive is skittish; I’m the only human allowed to touch him…until now.  “He likes you,” I say, the notion so shocking I’m having trouble making sense of it.

A giddy expression comes over the man’s face, and suddenly he looks more like a Chihuahua than a Doberman Pinscher. I watch saucer-eyed as Clive inches up his arm and comes to rest on the round of his shoulder. “Arrrgghh!” the man abruptly squeals, his lips curled into a fiendish smile, an eye pinched shut as if he’s channeling a pirate. He takes a couple of lurching steps, one foot clomping along stiffly as if it’s supporting a false leg.

“Not bad,” Ian remarks about the man’s performance.

“So, uh, it’s getting late,” Haley points out unnecessarily.

I line up shoulder to shoulder with the man, encouraging Clive to make the leap back to me. As soon as he does, I stuff him into his cage and secure George’s hoodie around it once again. “There.”

“You never answered me,” says the man, the shotgun back in his hands, his hollow gaze pinned on Ian’s forehead.

Opal’s voice is tiny. “Huh?”

“What exactly are you kids doin’?”

Kids? Do we look like we rode our tricycles here? “Listen,” I say, toying with the idea of spilling the beans, “we don’t want any trouble. We’re just trying to find something that belongs to my friend’s…great-uncle.” I tip my head in Ian’s direction. “His dad needs it real bad.”

The stranger lifts an eyebrow. “Needs what real bad?”

“A liver,” I say. “He’s got a disease. If he doesn’t get a new one soon, he’s gonna die.”

I can see the train of thought chugging through the man’s head. “Sorry,” he says, “I ain’t followin’.”

Fine. I guess it’s come down to this. “There’s something buried here,” I clarify. “Money. Coins. My friend’s dad needs them to pay for the operation.”

The man beams a gummy, gap-toothed smile. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”