Writing, Publishing and everything in-between.

A year ago I had a story rattling around inside my brain begging to be let out. The early stages were really fun because the characters were coming together like little markers on a game board. I did what anyone would normally do, and I ignored it for a while. Then one day I couldn’t take it anymore and I sat down and wrote for a few hours. Honestly, I cant remember the first thing I wrote down but I was having a great time doing it. On a whim I signed up for a community college writers workshop on fiction writing and I took my story with me. I got some great critiques and feedback and I kept chugging away, watching the words pile up on my google doc word count.

I knew right away that the novel was going to be a thriller and immediately I placed the setting aboard a ship. In college I spent two weeks on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico and it was a fantastic experience. However, there were so many things that happened that made my ears tingle or made me look over my shoulder. The boat made these creepy sounds all the time. Everything you did echoed on board and you could hear people moving around in different areas of the ship. Hours of the day became meaningless because we worked all hours of the day and night. Maybe I didn’t know right then but I had a story brewing.

Its been a year now and I have a completed manuscript that is going through a final round of edits. I took my book and my ideas to a writers conference and pitched my ideas to a few agents. I am learning how to write a query and I am sending it out there. However, this stage of the process is, well, it sucks. The writing part is awesome but the decision to get traditionally published with an agent feels like a grind. I am “in the trenches” they say.

Well if you have made it this far, I will treat you to the first two pages of my soon-to-be debut novel Undertow.

Felix woke soaking wet, his sheets damp with sweat. Instinctively, he reached for his phone and called Brigit, fumbling in the total darkness. Brigit had been his lifeline since birth. Fraternal twins often don’t share some of the same idiosyncrasies found in identical twins. However, Felix and Brigit never felt the need to follow prescribed rules. 

Brigit didn’t answer. She always answered the phone, especially when he called. They had a ringtone just for each other. Without thinking, Felix threw on a pair of running shoes with no socks and ran the four blocks to her duplex on the East side of campus. He rounded the corner cutting between two buildings and was met face to face with blue and white police lights. They flashed, reflecting off the windows of the homes like eerie stage lights in a theater production. His throat grew tight and his heart thumped uncomfortably in his chest “Please be ok,” he muttered to himself, but he knew the answer before talking to anyone. Brigit was gone. 

The police met him at the door of her room. Everything about the situation felt fake, like a scene from a movie set that he had accidentally walked in on. 

Her room was a mess, the mattress was lifted up, her papers everywhere on the floor, and her clothes were ripped from the closet. Felix immediately looked for her electronics and noticed her laptop and phone were gone, but her Apple Watch was charging on the stand. He noticed that her suitcase was also missing, and her new pair of running shoes. Maybe she had escaped before this had happened. A bus station maybe? Felix was running through the scenario in his head, and nothing added up. Brigit was a PhD student, in the middle of her senior thesis. She had a tight group of friends, a sometimes boyfriend, and a job on the weekend. People like that don’t run away. The police officer came up to Felix and asked him to leave, he was contaminating the crime scene. 

Felix sat on the edge of the sidewalk, his long legs bent at an odd angle. Nothing about this night had made sense. A large police officer came up to Felix and started asking him questions. The words seemed to fall out of the officer’s mouth through his mustache, impossible to comprehend. 

“I understand you are Brigit’s brother – Felix is it?” 

“Yes.” He answered flatly, unable to feel anything right now. 

“When was the last time you heard from her?”

“We talk every day, I talked to her yesterday about her project and graduation.”

“Did she seem ok?”

The conversation went on like that for twenty minutes. Yes she was ok, no this was not normal, no she wouldn’t run away with someone, no she was not experiencing depression, yes he would know that. On and on it went, and Felix felt more and more detached from the whole experience. When it finally finished, Felix would have no memory of this conversation; just the mustache of the police officer would remain. 

Felix tried to walk home but found that his feet wouldn’t take him. He kept making the block around her duplex, thinking that each time he rounded the corner the experience would be a dream. This time the police will be gone, he kept thinking, as he made another lap. Finally, another police officer grabbed him by the arm and shuttled him into her car. She asked him for a friend’s phone number and he blanked. Felix and Brigit had come to Harvard from Germany. All of their closest friends were in Germany and the only person he could think of was his childhood next door neighbor. Several minutes passed and he remembered his classmate Ade. Ade answered on the first ring, he had been up working on his thesis project, and the police officer relayed the information in short clinical sentences. Ade said he would be there immediately. 

Ade walked Felix back to his room and said he would spend the night. He talked for a few minutes with the officer who picked up Felix, and she told him the gist of the evening. Ade tried several times to start a conversation, but Felix was in shock and couldn't respond. Their small dorm had a sofa that sat between the two beds. Ade grabbed a blanket and a pillow and fell asleep within five minutes. Felix thought about sleeping in the same way that humans think about flying – it’s a thing that happens but will never happen to me. Felix felt for the first time since he was born, completely alone.