The Road to Publication: "The Wheel" Part 4 & A Novel Sneak Peek

Yes, there is an excerpt from my novel, Rue, below!

Getting a story ready for publication is a trip. I haven’t done this before. Sure I’ve written stuff and sure people have read it, but once I get The Wheel “done” and start posting it here, a lot more people will read it. I’ve got forty-one subscribers currently and about eight of them have read it already so that’s a big jump in potential readership, not counting all the people who might read without subscribing and eventual new subscribers.

It’s been a serendipitous week in The Wheelland. My buddy Aaron and I finally got a chance to talk about the story in more depth even though he read it months ago. At the time, I just wanted to know that I made him cry at the end. When he confirmed that I did, I sat back with a satisfied sigh and told myself that my work here was done.

It wasn’t, of course.

So before our Monday Movie Night (a tradition that started in the doldrums of Covid and has persisted for five fricken years), I asked him what he thought could make the story better. What did he do? Lob a fucking bomb into the middle of it. I should have known that might happen—he reads a lot—and that’s exactly why I wanted his opinion. He gave me feedback that he was hesitant to give because he knew it would require so much work but I wanted it regardless. I think the fact that it required so much work was what made me think it was the right way to go.

I agonized over this for two days. Should I rework this whole damn thing? Postpone my timeline? It was a great idea, but deep down, I knew I shouldn’t. It would require a wildly different starting point and would necessitate throwing out nearly half of the current story to make it work right. Not that his feedback was bad—it was 100% right—but not for this story. It was right for a story that is very similar but fundamentally different to the one I wrote and that story would be great too. However, I didn’t write that story and I don’t want to at this point.

Still, it grated on me. Was this the way to go? Surely the most painful route is always the correct one, right? RIGHT?

Then my buddy John and I met for beers after not seeing each other for a good long while and it turned out he was reading The Wheel and was literal pages from the end. I had no idea he was reading it so, happy day, we dove in and talked through his thoughts and all the stuff going through my mind since Aaron and I talked. I walked away from that conversation feeling more convinced that I didn’t need to rework the entire thing (but still wasn’t sure).

Such is the process of getting feedback on a story. Stephen King (there he is again) says that if a majority of your beta readers say the same thing, they are right. If it’s a tie, the author wins. Gosh, that’s liberating, but I still doubt my choices with every new round of feedback I get. (I’m really bad at making decisions if you haven’t noticed.)

This week, I’m looking forward to getting feedback from my friend David. He recently read The Wheel and I can’t wait to hear his suggestions. As always, some might work and others might not. (If he says the same thing Aaron said, I might claw my eyes out.) The good thing in this case is that my saying “I need your feedback sooner rather than later” turned into an opportunity to get his lovely family over for dinner. Can’t complain about that. Writing supports life. Life supports writing.

Regardless, I’ve divided The Wheel up and marked it out into sections with the intent of keeping each part sufficiently engaging but not taking too much of your precious time in one go. I’m shooting for 3,500 - 5,000 words per section, which should keep the reading time under twenty minutes while also not dividing this thing up too many times (there are currently nine sections). I’ve started edits and Jenelle is going to start on the art soon. It’s all getting very exciting.

But let’s rewind to Monday real quick. During that conversation with Aaron, I learned he is about ready to read my novel, Rue. I’m pretty excited about this so I printed a copy and put it in a binder. Then, while the kids were getting ready for bed, I started reading it.

And I couldn’t stop.

Then, I realized that I was dying to share some of my fiction. I can’t wait for The Wheel to be done and besides, what better way to build hype for that than by sharing some of my other work?

So without further ado, I’m going to share the prologue for my novel with you. Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe it’s a bad one, but sometimes I need to not stop and think about that and just go for it.

Here it is.

*Disclaimer: While I’ve poured over this thing many times, it has yet to be professionally edited and may not even make it into the final novel. Such is the nature of sharing a work in progress.

**Content warning: The following passage discusses suicidal feelings.

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Rue: Prologue

The last few explosions of the grand finale fired off in rapid succession. Red and blue sparks blew outward in large circular shapes, wreathed within falling streams of gold that continued to twinkle out of existence long after the erratic final echoes bounced back from the houses lining the other side of Gladstone Cove. There were oohs and ahhhs and everyone had their eyes on the sky.

Everyone except Charlotte Mills.

Charlotte only had eyes for Dustin and the girl on his right: Sarah. They were seated in green bag chairs amidst fifty to sixty other people, all friends and family of the Staceys. Charlotte had watched their every interaction throughout the entirety of the fireworks display.

On this particular night, the Fourth of July, Sarah Lifeson was the girl Charlotte wanted to be; Sarah, with her long, wavy, blonde hair, thin legs that didn’t so much as brush each other until they became her perfectly shaped hips, and breasts that were much more fully formed than any other tenth-graders at Osage High. Half the girls at Osage wanted to look like Sarah Lifeson, and the other half, along with all the boys, wanted to get in the sack with her. Charlotte, however, wanted to be her just like she wanted to be Tegan Davies the day before. Tegan was brunette rather than blonde but checked most of the other boxes. Three days before that—a Friday—it had been Laura Labadie. Even her name flowed off the tongue like it had survived millions of years of evolution to come out on top of the proper noun food chain.

Dustin Gerber had been Charlotte’s crush for nearly three years. She’d been on the planet for fifteen and only reliably remembered ten of those, so it may as well have been a lifetime. She had been certain that tonight was the night that would all change. A crush, years in the making, would become something more. She had worn her favorite summer dress, a simple thing that flowed just right, showed her chest and shoulders, and masked the tummy rolls underneath, for the most part. It was a flat green—like her mother’s out-of-control Pothos plant—with no decorative pattern or stitching whatsoever.

Dustin had dark skin that was even more so due to days spent on his parents’ boat. His black hair was close-cropped on the side, but even that was wavy. On top, it was oh-so-long, but the curls held it in place. On many school nights over the winter before, she had found that imagining she was running her fingers through that hair as she cupped the back of his head went very well with other feelings that she was new to conjuring but was quickly mastering.

Hi, Dustin, she had said stupidly earlier that night. He had been getting another can of Coke from the cooler at the time, and she stood on the other side of it as if he had been retrieving the beverage just for her, but of course, he wasn’t. She hadn’t noticed Sarah Lifeson standing there next to him; she was that focused on striking up the conversation that would change the course of her romantic life. She nearly jumped when Dustin grabbed another Coke and handed the first to Sarah. The simple act of moving his hand out of his own personal bubble and into another that was neither his nor hers nor theirs shocked Charlotte into a sick sensory overload. Suddenly, Sarah’s perfume was in her nostrils, and Sarah’s breasts and long, slender neck were obscuring her vision. Charlotte was so consumed that she almost didn’t hear it when he said it.

Hey, Charlie.

Then he snickered and turned away. Charlotte’s mouth cracked open, and her brow sunk in the middle as if pulled down by the weight of her chin. Sarah turned to follow Dustin but looked back at her momentarily, and an expression crossed her face, oh so briefly. Was it pity?

As they walked away, Charlotte’s index finger rose and brushed across her upper lip involuntarily. This was a gesture that hadn’t manifested itself all that much before May of 2011 but had happened a whole lot since then—since the peach fuzz that sprouted there began to darken ever so slightly.

You having fun, Charlotte?

It was her Dad’s voice that hit her left eardrum and her Dad’s arm that curled around her right shoulder, squeezing it.

She must have indicated that she was.

Great. Fireworks are about to start, I saved you a spot.

He let go of her then, and she turned to watch him go. He wasn’t stumbling, but the line he was walking wasn’t drawn with a ruler, either. He would probably insist on driving home that night, and her mother would argue with him about it, unsuccessfully.

She did not join her Dad in her appointed chair on the lawn, and he did not seem to notice. Instead, she stood behind the crowd, behind the fireworks, watching from the shadow of the house and counting every single time that Dustin Gerber turned to Sarah Lifeson and uttered some small, sweet nothing during the display. Her dress was in bunches between pulsating palms when, during the finale, she saw Dustin’s hand cross over the fabric chair arms and take Sarah’s as a magnificent bunch of his own.

Pop…pop-pop-pop came the final echoing report from across the lake. Everyone hooted and hollered and got up from their chairs to acquire another alcoholic beverage. Charlotte, so sick to her stomach, couldn’t have drunk one even if her Dad had offered it again. She no longer had eyes for Dustin Gerber or for Sarah Lifeson.

Where you going, Charlotte?

As she walked toward The Lake of the Ozarks, she didn’t even realize that she responded to Mr. Stacey as he strutted, triumphant, up the lawn from the dock where he had lit off a small fortune for all to see.

She told him she was going to dip her feet in the water.

Dip her feet in, she did. Then her ankles, her knees, her tummy—as mother called it—her oh so bothersome tummy, then the undersides of her breasts, her nipples, her neck…

She began to swim. Her dress both clung to her like a constricting film and billowed around her like a cloud.

When she felt she was far enough, deep enough, she stopped treading water briefly and turned towards the shore. Party lights zig-zagged between house and tree and tree, illuminating the small crowd of people as they meandered around the Staceys’ lawn. Some were grabbing chairs and getting ready to leave, but most appeared to have no intention of going anytime soon. She saw her father just as his head leaned back to shoot his boisterous laugh bouncing across the still water. Hearing that sound, regardless of how alcohol-fueled it was, almost shook her resolve. She would have to explain how she got so wet, but that would only raise her parents’ frustration and make her feel stupid—both minor problems that she was used to dealing with. Sticking to her plan would certainly send monumental shockwaves through their lives, but…

I won’t be around to feel bad about it.

That thought did shake her nerve, and just as she leaned forward in the water to give up on her terrible plan and start swimming, she heard smaller laughs and the creak of dock wood. Two figures were walking toward her, hand in hand. They stopped at the end, and Charlotte let herself sink lower until all that was left above the water were nostrils, breathing, and eyeballs, peering.

Dustin and Sarah.

And they kissed.

Before she could even think, Charlotte dropped into a pencil shape and thrust her arms upwards. Down she drifted, and then she did this again and one more time until her feet came into contact with seaweed of some kind. It repulsed her, and she considered shooting back up again, but…

If she was going to kill herself, she couldn’t rightly be afraid of simple seaweed, could she?

Then her foot struck something hard. She winced underwater but resisted the urge to surface. She blew air out and began to sink all the faster. More weeds began to snake their tendrils around her legs—one even seemed to slide up through her dress and along the smoothness of her inner thigh like the inquisitive fingers of a lover. She shuddered with lurid pleasure but still blew bubbles.

A dull pop overhead, muffled by the water.

Charlotte’s eyes flicked open, letting the water in as light burst out in all directions. Another flash and pop followed, then another, and Charlotte’s foot hit the hard thing again. She cried out this time, sending out more air, and looked down into the blackness. More sound and more light ballooned outward overhead, and what Charlotte saw in its flash, ever so briefly, was a stone among the weeds. It was thin, jutted upwards, and seemed to be square in nature—too uniform for a simple rock.

No more fireworks launched overhead, but the synapses in her brain fired instead, making macabre connections beyond the speed of light. She remembered her local history class the year prior and thought about how The Lake of the Ozarks was man-made and how many things got slowly swallowed up when the river was dammed.

Could cemeteries have been one such thing?

All at once, fear gripped her, and she gave up. What was she doing out here, exactly, several hundred feet out from Mr. Stacey’s lawn and a hundred more from all of her friends and family?

And even less from Dustin and Sarah, kissing on the end of the dock.

She attempted to brush this thought away just as she tried to shake away the seaweed that now seemed to be holding her from swimming upward. She kicked at it and struggled as panic began to grip and compress what air remained in her nearly empty chest. Then the weeds broke loose, and she kicked even harder, only for something else to grab her ankle and hold it like a vice. Was it a hand?

It couldn’t be.

Whatever it was, she tried to kick it loose, but it grabbed on even tighter, and then a second was on her calf and a third above her knee. Leafy tendrils began to swirl around her free leg, and finally, Charlotte screamed underwater, letting out the little air that remained and pulling in water to fill its place. She choked and flapped her arms madly, trying to gain the surface, but all she ever seemed to do was go down.

Down.

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