Ergh, ever have one of those days where your head just feels packed with sand and you haven’t even been drinking and coffee makes it worse haha?

Don’t really have much to blather about today really, GS2 trucking along, my publishing deal is working out ok. I was checking out my publisher and he’s a right wing christian so I was like ‘phew’ I can’t afford to have another enemy at this point haha. It’s not that I hate left wing people, it’s just I’m abrasive as fuck and I love to troll and trigger people and leftwing people just don’t go in for that. So if I was constantly offending him that would be a problem.

The ideas for the Dexter continuations/spinoff are firing on all cylinders, I was in the shower just writing on my rainfall showerhead haha. It’s really spinning together in my head, it’s falling in to place and it’s almost a problem because I’m like a dog trying to chase two cars now haha. Like I’m balls deep into GS2 right now but now I’m looking over to this like ‘Mmm’, mainly because it’s like that sort of fun but with the serious edge to it like LCYE. It’s not a dumb zombie novel but could be just as fun as one to write.

Some people are reading this and going like ‘why aren’t you writing it down?’. My process isn’t really like that, if I wrote down what was in my head right now it would just be a mess. It’s like giving birth to a baby, you can’t rush it, it needs to be a solid fully realised mass before it can born or it wont be whole. I need to hammer it out and forge the idea before I can start shaping it into something real.

I mentioned before I didn’t really get that much positive feedback from The one who came back, and honestly that’s bad from something that could be standalone, or it could be a loose series. Porter Caraway is a character I want to keep. But I’ve worked out a deal with my original editor Nat to do a chapter by chapter edit on the cheap and I’ll probably just give it out as a free novel through my mailing list because I owe you people more free shit and it’s not a bad novel, it’s just not my best I guess. It was rushed over nano, but it still has something. So there’s that.

Check out the unedited excerpt below and you can always read the whole raw thing on inkitt with the link below.

See you…

Red Shoes

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Peggy thought if thy gave him a normal routine, he’d snap back eventually and become the kid they knew. So for a few days he got up he had breakfast, he had lunch and dinner, he watched movies, he went for a drive. A steady diet of normalcy, easing him out of his shell.

She had Brandon take him for a drive to a storage locker close to their old place. It was a large concrete block of a place, filled inside with red sliding shutters packed in tight. Like some kind of maze.

They found their locker. Brandon opened the padlock on the big red sliding shutter with a key from his jeans pocket.

“We locked up most of your stuff here when we moved. Momma didn’t have the heart to take it back, it was too hard for her, you know.” Brandon forced a smile and lead Johnny into the musty storage locker.

It wasn’t that full, it was a smaller box locker about six by six. There was a mattress on it’s side with a large brown stain in the middle, probably from damp in the locker.

Boxes, lots of boxes, some of them looked a little soggy.

“Hey why don’t we split up and see what we can find?” Brandon said smiling, like it was a game.

“Ok” Johnny said.

He smiled like a big brother. Johnny seemed like he was getting more comfortable talking to people. It was reassuring to hear his voice louder even if it was in a different accent. Brandon put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder. He breathed in and patted him on the back and ruffled his hair a little knocking off his baseball cap. Johnny was still wearing his dark glasses inside so there was more work to be done but there was some progress. Some light at the end of the tunnel.

Johnny opened a box that said ‘Johnny’s stuff’ on it.

“We kept everything the cops didn’t take, you know, for evidence”.

Johnny went through the box that was mostly pictures and little toys. Army men and gun shaped things, nothing really stood out except one picture.

It was a picture of Johnny before he disappeared. He was standing under a tree with a man who’s head was cut off by the top of the picture. Even though he couldn’t see his face he knew he hadn’t met this person yet. He couldn’t remember him from any of the other pictures he’d been shown.

He looked at himself in the picture and the expression was odd. He looked sick or sad or scared, and was fingering a strange necklace or pendant hanging around his neck.

Brandon stuck his chin over Johnny’s shoulder as he put a box of moth balls down.

“Oh that’s your older brother Jack” He got a little closer and pointed directly at the necklace. “He bought you that weird necklace thing you’d never take off. You were always into that aliens and ghosts and voodoo crap as a kid, dungeons and dragons, you know.” He paused and cocked his head for a moment as if he was struggling to fill the silence “I mean what kid isn’t? Some of the neighbours thought you were abducted by aliens” He laughed.

Brandon got a little sad as she took the picture off of him. “This was taken a couple of days before you went missing.” He gave it back to him and Johnny studied it.

Johnny took a closer look at the necklace in the picture. It was some kind of bird. Maybe an owl, standing on top of a circle with a five pointed star in it like it was the hood ornament of a car.

“Oh that’s right. You’ll probably meet Jack later today at the barbecue.” Brandon hiked up a box on his hip and turned around “It was supposed to be a surprise, Peggy’s idea. I got you out of the house for a bit and we have a little welcome home barbecue. Get you re-acquanited with some of the family.” He walked towards the entrance. “Come on, help me to the car with some of this stuff and we’ll see how it’s going.”

Johnny nodded. He put the picture back in the box and closed it up then picked it up and walked to the entrance of the locker. Brandon slid the door closed.

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