About |
“The past never leaves you. It may be forgotten from time to time, but it’s never completely gone. As long as a fragment remains in your head, it always has an anchor. For most people, the past just stays buried, but sometimes it becomes a surreal experience. For me, the past came calling at a most unusual time.”
That is the first paragraph from my debut novel, “The Second Girl” which I hope to publish sometime in 2015.
I’ve been writing stories since I was in the 3rd grade, growing up in a small Alabama town, self-publishing crude handwritten with terrible stick-figure drawings, and handing them out to friends. I’ve started a lot of books over the years, stories I was sure would become “great novels” but they languished with plot holes and creative torpedoes within a few weeks. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t tie it all together in an interesting way-at least that is what I thought.
When I got the idea for my latest work, I decided to post the first chapter on Reddit and see what people thought. I wrote it as a play-by-play of the main character, titled “I Got Stood Up” and formatted in a way that would make it difficult to discern whether or not this was a real event or a piece of fiction. I used real places, real dates, and fact-checked to confirm things I referenced in my story would appear exactly the same way they did to the character if anyone researched it. I was going for realism, hoping the story would be interesting enough for the readers.
The reactions were remarkable! People loved the story. The realistic approach helped them follow the events as though they were happening in real time-the readers were along for the ride. Over the course of October, I posted updates almost daily, each update serving as a new chapter in the tale of Mike, a guy who was stood up by his childhood friend, and quickly found himself as the key suspect in her subsequent disappearance. Mike was forced to use the clues he got in one conversation with Betty to try and figure out exactly what happened, with his moral compass spinning with each new clue he found. There were sinister forces behind her disappearance-and one of could be Betty herself.
After posting 20 chapters and an epilogue, a 65,000 word first draft was born. In addition to the hundreds of readers, I was contacted by authors, editors, artists and even a foreign film director. They all loved the story and they wanted to see it go from the pages of Reddit, to a real-life novel. As someone who struggled to even get his ideas past the first five chapters, I was blown away by the response.
In an effort to try and do exactly what they asked, I started a Kickstarter which can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/thesecondgirl. After one week, the project is 23% funded. This could be the beginnings of something big, but it needs more support to see the light of day. A professionally edited first draft of Chapter 1, titled Happenstance, is available for viewing on Kickstarter. I invite you to check it out, fall in love with the story like other readers have, and help see it through to publication.
The readers are the real heroes; the world needs more of them.