My Upcoming Novel
My first novel is in the works at the moment. I'm currently working on my sixth draft of the first 40 pages (typed on Microsoft Word). This Inspirational Fiction piece centers on George Peterson, an award winning news reporter for one of the top daily newspapers on the East Coast. Young and successful, with his own home and few bills or worries, he seems to have the American dream. However, there is something deeper to the man. He's given up everything for his career, including his family and his sense of the world around him. Yet there is something at his root that haunts him, and he must face it if he is to move on past it. He then meets Crystal, a kind young humanitarian. Will he give himself a second chance at being reconnected with a life of meaning with Crystal? Or will he push her away too as his life journey takes him through many events that will test his character in ways he never imagined?
Check out the first 2 pages of this untitled novel below.
Untitled Novel Pages 1 and 2
Chapter 1 Late Night Phone Calls
**We all change. We're people and we grow and move on through different identities and phases of life. We make mistakes, we learn, and progress as we realize what's really important in our lives. It's just human nature and it's what we do. In this case, change had come from a dark and unmentionable pain that was heaped upon one man; so much that it didn't just cause change, but an altering of his very character. Once you're changed, can you ever come back? Can you ever return to being the person you were meant to be? Or are you forever trapped; a prisoner to your past?**
“NO!” The shrill scream erupted through the dark bedroom. It's sound waves penetrated the white pine windowpane where midnight rays entered; breaking the barrier between the wintery world outside and the warm still house. Had anyone been on the snowy frozen street outside, they would have heard the echo of the blood curdling scream coming from inside. Instead, the sound went unnoticed under the midnight moon lit sky.
The young man in the bed inside tore his sheets off and sat straight up, now woken from his deep sleep by the shriek of his own screams. His heart was pounding like an anvil and his fingers were still shaking. His whole face was covered in sweat, and his flannel pajamas were smeared with blotches of sweat as well. This was George Peterson.
George's eyes frantically paced over the bedroom, first at the blue curtains, then all around at the room at his high definition tv, cedar bureau, and fine art paintings neatly hung next to his closet. It was a drab and dark setting of colors and patterns, for the exception of the colorful art work collected in the gold colored frames with fancy European names scribbled at the bottom. Each painting had some theme of stars or galactic heavens in it, giving the room a sense of openness to the night sky above.
He breathed a sigh of relief, realizing after a few seconds, that he was at home in bed. George slowly lifted his right hand to wipe away the beads of sweat from his face then looked down at his arms, which were still uncontrollably shaking as his legs were doing the same motion. After a few more brief moments of recollecting himself, he swung them over the bed and onto the floor. He gained his footing and took a few wobbly steps, heading to the bathroom, where he hoped to regain some composure.
His face hands and body were completely soaked as if he had jumped out of a pool. It hadn't helped that he kept his heater cranked, pushing the temperature up to a sizzling 80 degrees. The sweat dripped down onto the floor, collecting in small pools along the floor tiles. George moaned as if being tortured by some unseen force rising from the dead of night as he moped his face and hands up with a red towel from his wooden rack hung along the side of the sink. He had quickly grabbed it and made a wet and soppy mess out of the towel that had been so clean and neatly hung before.
No, not again! But it was a dream, just a dream this time, but it happened before. Yet why did it have to happen? Why to me? George thought in befuddled wonderment as he struggled to come to grips with a reoccurring nightmare drenched in his subconscious fear of what was past but still all to real even after all these years. He stood, bent over the sink, staring at himself in the mirror with the wet towel hung over his shoulders. His eyes gave a frozen and fixated gaze as if expecting answers to jump out from face. His eyes remained frozen for a minute, continuing their stare, scared by invisible tears. This was a frantic state, but one George had grown somewhat used to as these common nightmares had become his most familiar enemy.
George took several minutes to just look straight into the bathroom mirror. He stared straight into the mirror at the 5”10” sturdy 170 pound framed sculpture that stared right back at him, matching his every move, right down to the twitch of his small brown eyes. His oval face was polished off with a crop top haircut that resembled the mandatory style required by the army, but his finely groomed goatee and mustache made his distinction stand out as individual rather than a stereotype “GI” who followed the “army of one.”
He could hear his fears and thoughts spinning around his head getting the best of him.
“At least I'm home in bed and I'm fine.” He constantly reassured himself in a whisper under his shortened breathe.
George had grown up here in Nashua, where he enjoyed the best education his parents could provide. He graduated with a B.A. in Journalism, and was hired by the Manchester Gazette. After several years of award-winning work, George was fortunate enough to secure a staff writer position at the Boston Times. It was a remarkable feat for someone under 30, but made possible by his multiple awards and unusually long list of experience for someone so young in a fiercely competitive field. However, the real key to his hiring lied in his endless list of prominent networking contacts. George covered hard news, but wrote an occasional feature piece in his position at the Times, where he had been for four years. Since college, it had been a never ending roller coaster ride of work, but one such a ride he had enjoyed like a kid screaming at the top of his lungs as a wild ride dips and turns.
George then walked down the wood floor hallway and sat at the desk in his home office. He knew this would be the only way to calm himself again.
George carefully read through a stack of police reports and fact sheets on his desk, and paused just long enough to look up at the wall. Countless academic and journalist awards and plaques dating from high school through his career at the Boston Times decorated the otherwise plain white wall. The honor rolls for Nashua Christian Academy and the University of Pennsylvania and President’s award for outstanding scholastic achievement were all there. Not a single award was missing. All color coordinated, each one in a gold colored picture frame with little curvatures resembling Greek architecture making up the perimeter decoration of the frames. Gold was after all, the dominant color of his office. It was a color of winners. It dated back to the ancient Olympic games in Athens. Gold was the color of winners; only the first place competitors received them. And that's what George always aspired to be, a winner.
Out of all the awards, his most prestigious one was the marble plaque for the Manchester Gazette Journalist of the year, which hung over his desk. George smiled as he stared at the marble award with his name engraved in gold.
He always looked at his awards while he typed away on his latest article. The thoughts of his accomplishments gave him a boost of energy late at night when he was feeling the weakness of his human body, yearning for sleep.
These materialistic representations were the only life he had known since that time so long ago when the darkness had stolen his soul and raped his mind, leaving him a broken man unable to feel anything more than a keyboard beneath his fingertips.