A birthday present

Yesterday was my birthday, so in the spirit of such celebrations I'm going to give all of you a present.

I've mentioned before that I've already written a good chunk of a thriller, Fatal Circle, that I plan one day to finish and sell. On Thursday, September 11, 2008, I read the first page and a quarter of that book at a signing. Other than that one time, I've never shown any of the book to anyone.

Here's that tiny introductory bit of the novel, in completely raw, unedited, embarrassingly rough first-draft form. These are the words as they came from my keyboard; the final text will be much, much better. (Can you tell I'm having to talk myself into showing this to you without rewriting it first?)

Enjoy.

***

As Mike Hood watched the two men watching him, he realized that the life he had carefully constructed for the last five years was evaporating in the shimmering waves of heat rising off the strip mall parking lot almost as quickly as the small, dark puddles still standing from last night’s rain.

On his lunch break, stretched out flat on the low brick wall in front of InCompute, he was enjoying the unexpectedly hot last day of September when he spotted the two men for the second time that day. From the moment he’d left CitFree, he’d known they could come for him, but the knowledge didn’t diminish his confusion. Why now? He’d done nothing to merit the attention, yet he also knew they had to have a reason. As much as he’d hated the agency, he’d never seen anyone in it act without a strong belief that their action was necessary and justified.

He arched and stretched his back, sat up, and pulled his hair into a ponytail, repeating the same movements he made every day before his after-lunch walk. When he was at CitFree, visible habits were enemies, weaknesses others could use against you. Only civilians could afford habits, and all the ordinary people he’d studied had possessed them. When he left, he knew that to fit in he had to have habits, too, so he cultivated them with the same studied effort he brought to every task. He went too far, of course--he now understood that moderation wasn’t in him--and he knew that those few who considered him a casual friend thought him obsessive at best.

He quickened his pace as he walked along his daily route, up the covered walkway in front of the ever-changing storefronts that occupied the doomed side of the L-shaped mall, across the feeder road, behind the Burger King, down US 70, and then behind the Wal-Mart that was the only merchant keeping the mall from commercial extinction. He forced himself to look only straight ahead in the hopes that his tails would believe he’d become sloppy enough to miss them. CitFree never worked in the open, so the only danger point was behind the Wal-Mart. He considered cutting out that part of the walk, but doing so would tell even a bad team that he was onto them. He figured he could duck into a rear employees’ entrance if it came to that, but fortunately over a dozen men were unloading a pair of trucks behind the store and he was never at risk of being alone. The tails didn’t follow him, and he relaxed a bit as he passed along the white concrete rear wall of the block-long building.

As he emerged into the bright parking lot from the shadow of the Wal-Mart’s far wall, they were waiting, pretending to chat near a beat-up green F150, and he caught one clear look at them. He stared a moment too long and for a second made eye contact with the taller one, so he nodded, said, “Nice truck” even though he knew they probably couldn’t hear him, and kept moving. He had to force himself not to shake his head in disgust at himself; making eye contact was inexcusable. He reviewed the snapshot image in his mind as he continued on to the front of InCompute. Both men were in jeans and dark blue t-shirts, and both wore gimme caps from a used car dealership down the road. One was Caucasian, a bit over six feet tall, thin, with dark brown hair, a few days of stubble, and a thin pale line showing above the tanned part of his right arm and below his t-shirt sleeve. The other was a few inches shorter, probably twenty pounds heavier, and Hispanic.

He noted in their reflections in the InCompute window that both were watching him directly; amateurs. Either CitFree was desperate for help, or he’d somehow attracted the attention of some low-end local group. He knew from the study of the area he’d made before he chose it that even the bikers who ran the organized trades in Raleigh and Durham would handle a surveillance job better than these two losers.

No, a local group made no sense. Stick to Occam’s razor, he reminded himself; someone from CitFree had to be running these guys. That he couldn’t spot the agent in charge suggested that he might know the leader.

Too bad; he hated killing people he knew.

What am I doing now?

A few folks have asked me what I'm doing now that I've finished Children No More, so I thought I'd give a quick run-down of the various projects on my non-day-job plate.

Children No More: Yes, I finished writing it, but now I'm reviewing the proof pages. That does take time.

Wake Up Horny, Wake Up Angry: I'm doing the premiere of this spoken word/stand-up comedy show at one minute past midnight late on Saturday night/early on Sunday morning at Balticon. If you're in the area, you should definitely come to the con and see the show; the con is great, and the show should make you laugh. Right now, I'm still working on the show, and I'll probably be doing so until about three seconds before I step on stage. Maybe a little longer than that.

The Wild Side: I'm editing this anthology of erotic urban fantasy stories. Most of the stories are in, with one in rewrite and my own still to come. I'm also collecting the afterwords from the authors and their bios. I'll tell more about this one in a few weeks. I'm working on my story now.

Fatal Circle: This near-future thriller will be my next novel project. Because I already have about a third of it in first draft and have a huge (26K words) outline for it, I hope to finish it far more quickly than most of my books.

In addition to these projects, I have three interesting things in the works that I can't discuss quite yet. One is the surprise announcement I mentioned some time ago, and the other two are still not ready for me to discuss. It's all good, though.

Seeing such a short list makes me wonder why I'm feeling overwhelmed. I clearly have to work harder!

How I work with my agent

As I mentioned in last night's entry, Maria asked me to comment on how I sold my first book and on my agent. I covered in that entry how I sold One Jump Ahead; tonight, I'll briefly discuss how I work with my agent.

First, as yesterday's entry makes clear, I did not use an agent to sell my first book. It never even crossed my mind to approach an agent for that sale, because I figured I would have to go through the slush pile and sell at least once on my own before any agent worth having would even consider taking me. I was luckier than that, as I explained, but I never contemplated getting an agent at that point.

After I sold the first book and wrote a story I owed an editor, I began plotting and then writing a mystery/thriller, Fatal Circle. I wanted--and still want--to work in multiple genres. It occurred to me that an agent might be valuable for this thriller, so I thought about getting one.

Dave's agent, Kay McCauley of the Pimlico Agency, was not accepting new clients, but a long time ago in a discussion about a nonfiction book, she had said she might consider representing me. Though I have never met Kay in person, I have exchanged multiple email messages with her and had multiple phone conversations. In all of them, she has come across as gracious, cultured, intelligent, and generally wonderful. Plus, Dave trusts her, which is big. I contacted her, she agreed to take me on as a client, and that was that. We never signed any paper; we're honorable people and didn't need it.

At that point, I was about 38K words into Fatal Circle. I did not want Kay to sell it until I had finished it. Then, Toni, based on preorders, decided she wanted three more Jon & Lobo books--and she wanted one each year. I was already behind schedule. We did a contract--again on my own, because I had done the first Jon & Lobo book deal on my own--and I had to put aside Fatal Circle to begin work on Slanted Jack.

This left Kay in the position of having nothing of mine to sell aside from foreign rights, on which she and her folks work.

I hope one day to give her the thriller to sell.

That's it. As you might expect, this whole setup is not the usual one, but that seems to be par for the course for my novelist career so far.

Not as good a story, Maria; sorry.

I miss my thriller

I'm greatly enjoying writing Overthrowing Heaven. Despite that, today I had a great idea for the second thriller in my series--the same series in which I haven't finished the first book, Fatal Circle. Something around 40,000 words of that novel are sitting in my online drawer, gathering virtual dust, while I finish Overthrowing Heaven and then Children No More, the fourth Jon & Lobo book. When I'm done with that one, I plan to get back to the thriller, which I've been feeling strong urges to write.

I've also been having a real hankering to write Hero Boy, a book (and start of a series, I hope) that will take me to dark places I think I need to revisit.

So many stories to tell, so little time.

Back to the current one.