Cha...cha...cha...Changes!

Bloomsbury has decided to make a few last minute changes to my debut novel. They will be changing the title from Avery McShane and the Silver Spurs to simply Avery McShane. I'm fine with it. The book is the first of a series, so it makes sense. The other change is that they are having their illustrators come up with a new cover. Their marketing team tested the waters and decided that the original cover art was 'too young'. I totally agree with them. I've already seen the drafts of the new cover and I really like where they're going with it. The sense of danger, mystery and adventure will come across better than before.

This all means that the release date has been pushed back a few months to March 1st. I think the changes will be worth the wait.

More Good News

By now you know that I have a book coming out on March 1st called Avery McShane and the Silver Spurs. I've also already completed two sequels to it and they are in the hands of my publisher, Bloomsbury.

You may also recall that I have another manuscript called Paleopeople which is actually the first thing I wrote. It was the one that brought me Sterling Lord, my agent, and he is marketing it. It's a pretty epic story and it's long. I'm guessing 500 plus pages when all is said and done. It's a story within a story, and I just finished re-writing one of the threads so that the book fits more into a Harry Potter sort of genre.

I wrote another manuscript called Achilles Wept, a thriller for older audiences than I usually target. I guess I was a little out of my element, because my agent rejected it outright. I plan to revisit that manuscript and have thoughts of tweaking it to fit a more YA/paranormal audience. For now, it's moth-balled. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

Now for the most recent news, of the positive sort. I submitted a manuscript to my agent called The Pirates of Xingu. It took him over 5 months to review it, which was agonizing. With him it's either rejected or accepted. So when I finally received his notes, I realized that I had gotten over the big hurdle. He would be taking it on, assuming I would work on it some more. No problem there. Book number three is moving down the tracks to publication...fingers crossed.

Finally, since it's been five months since I submitted the Xingu script, I've gotten a few hundred pages into my newest creation. It's called The Thief of Shadows, and it is by far my darkest work to date.

I realize now that I haven't really displayed my writing style to anyone outside my very tight reading circle. I'm going to fix that. I am going to attach the first draft of the first chapter of Thief of Shadows, for your general amusement. I don't think that it gives away the story, or any trade secrets, so I should be good. I should mention that I am not happy about the formatting limitations of this blog. I would love to have been able to double space it for instance. Oh well, here goes.

Where the Leaning Buildings Meet

You would not have guessed that it was the middle of the afternoon of a particularly warm, bright and cloudless day - not if you walked the cobblestone walkway beneath the place where the leaning buildings meet. The Rue de Noir is the shortest street in New Orleans, but it was never really a street. It can not be found on a map or a GPS or the internet and, unless you know exactly where it is, you would never find it. In fact, it is scarcely wide enough for a single person to pass through, and certainly not wide enough for the rush hour automobiles passing by the entrance to it on the main street. The red brick walls of the leaning buildings are ancient and crumbling, and in places covered with moss and crawling ivy, but there are no windows or emergency fire escapes or anything else upon them. And if you happened to pass by the entrance to the Rue de Noir you would not guess what it leads to. You would not figure that it leads to a very narrow black door at the end of the passage. And even if you knew of it’s existence, you would never, ever believe what would be found on the other side of that door.

Only one person ever passed through that dark place, which is exactly what Madame Lasalle was doing at the very moment that this story begins. To those who had even noticed her moving slowly along the main street before she disappeared into the Rue de Noir (and there were very few who ever did), she was an old and hunched figure, wrapped in a hooded brown robe that dragged on the ground, hiding her feet from view, giving those few the sense that she moved down the sidewalk without taking steps. It was as if she simply floated, pushed along by a breeze that no one else felt. No one ever followed her, but if they had they would have discovered that she never went into a store, or hailed a taxi, or ever stopped moving slowly along the sidewalks and back alleys of New Orleans. If they had followed her every single day, they would have noticed that, although her path there varied, she always went to the old St. Louis Cemetery - every day, at noon. They would have seen the faceless, hooded robe gliding slowly down every path and past every tomb and grave, never stopping before a single one. 

And it was from this daily trip that Madame Lasalle had returned to the Rue de Noir. When she reached the far end of the alley, the black door opened on its own and the orange light from the room beyond illuminated the brick walls for a brief moment before the door closed behind her and the alley returned to shadow. 

-----

The swamp that Kieran Renaud had lived in his whole life was not very far away from the place where the leaning buildings meet, but it was an entirely different world. As a crow flies, it is only about an hour (if it does not stop to annoy someone with its irritating caw, which they love to do) and, as it happens, an unusually large crow had just taken that journey. It landed on the barren, moss-covered branch of the dying cypress tree across from the house on stilts, but it did not caw. Instead, it simply stood there without moving, staring with its beady black eyes at the wooden shack that hovered ten feet above the swamp on four very rickety poles.

The crow waited for hours. It saw many things while it waited: water moccasins and alligators patrolling the murky brown waters, river rats scurrying in the weeds along the banks, long-legged herons plucking shiny minnows from the depths and, shortly after the sun set, hundreds of glowing fireflies moving about like so many tiny candles. But the crow had not made the trip to the swamps to see these things. It waited for just one thing and, when the boy wearing only a pair of threadbare shorts opened the screen door and walked out onto the porch of the house, the crow saw what it had come to see. Without so much as a caw, the black bird took flight, heading back to whence it came - to the Rue de Noir.

Kieran did not see the crow fly away. The sun had set and it was already dark and a low fog had begun to gather and hover over the surface of the swamp. The fireflies above the fog gleamed brightly, while the ones within it gave off only glowing hints of their existence. They were the only lights in the warm and damp confines of the cypress forest. The boy stretched his arms above his head and then rubbed the sleepy bugs from his eyes. He had taken a nap, which is what he always did in the heat of the late afternoon, and he was now refreshed and ready to greet his parents when they returned from fishing. He would soon return inside to the kitchen to prepare the roux for the catfish gumbo. It was the same routine each day and he was very comfortable with it.

Kieran Renaud was an only child and, at the time, he was almost thirteen years old. Although he did not know it, he was born of the first day of August, in the same shack he had called home his whole life. He had never been outside the swamp, or even very far away from the place where he now stood, but he did not even know that it was unusual. To him, it was not odd that his long wavy hair was blond and that his parents hair was short and black. He did not wonder how it was that his parents were both very dark-skinned and that his skin was porcelain white - that they had brown eyes and his were emerald green. He really did not know any better.

His parents loved him and he loved them, and that was all that mattered. Kieran did not want for food or for friendship. For that he had his parents and he had the companionship of the swamp animals which suited him fine. He was a happy child.

Kieran walked back into the dark shack. He fumbled around on the table for the matches and soon had the Coleman lantern that hung from the rafters glowing in a warm yellow light that illuminated the single room of his home. It was a large room with a round wooden table and three chairs in the middle of it. Three hemp hammocks hung on one side of the open space, where the family slept. On the opposite side of the room was an unusually large iron pot-bellied stove with a sooty black pipe extending from it and up through the ceiling. Kieran crossed the room, opened the grated door to the inside of the stove and lit the twigs and branches he had gathered that morning for the fire he would need to make the roux. He was quite proud to accomplish the procedure with a single match. He shut the iron door and the orange and red color of the flames flickered through the grates. The heavy cast iron pot was already on top of the stove, and the alligator fat was already starting to melt, when he felt the shudder of a strong gust of wind hitting the shack. When it ended a moment later, Kieran shrugged his shoulders and resumed his task. 

The youngster was excited. He knew that some time that very night, while it was still dark out, he would turn thirteen. His parents had told him this before they left to check the catfish lines. Kieran never knew exactly when the day would come, just that it had before and would again. There were no calendars in the shack and he did not really grasp the meaning of measuring time (beyond the understanding that a day comes and goes, and another will follow). He did not know about years, months, weeks, days, or even minutes and hours. His parents never used the words. In fact, there was nothing in the room with writing upon it - no books or note pads or pencils or pens or sheets of paper, and he had never even heard of them. No electrical cables reached out from the nearest town to power a television or radio or computer, and Kieran did not know that these things existed, or that a town was nearby with other people living in it. To him, the world was where he was and had been.

If Kieran had had some of those everyday things he would have learned of the hurricane and he would have worried about his parents. He would have fretted about the shack on its jittery stilts and the safety of the wildlife, and he would have questioned his own safety. Still, when the second blast of wind hit the shack - when the whole structure began to sway back-and-forth from the invisible impact - he did begin to take notice. He was not frightened (not yet), but he was curious. He walked to the porch and when he arrived there, another gust greeted him with such force that he was compelled to latch onto the wooden handrail to remain on his feet. He felt the first drop of rain on his bare chest and the second one on his bare foot and, only a few moments later, a wall of racing wind and rain passed over him. The first cooling rain drops had suddenly turned into a stinging assault on Kieran’s body and his skin goose-bumped from the coldness and pain of it. The tin roof of the porch burst into a raucous beating sound. The rain no longer fell straight down from the sky. Instead, it rode the now howling wind and it entered, uninvited, into the shack through the slamming screen door and through the open windows. 

Kieran scrambled back inside, cowering behind the wood plank wall. He felt the cold wet fingers of Mother Nature reaching through the cracks in the planks. He watched as the tethered hammocks danced and swirled crazily, and he saw the flames of the stove reach out through the grates of the oven door and through the cracks of the swaying stove pipe. He heard the screeching and tearing sound of the porch roof as it ripped away from its tenuous moorings. And by this time he was truly frightened.

He had never before felt this kind of fear. He knew that a snake could give him a venomous bite and that an alligator could take someone under the water. He did not fear so much as respect these things because he knew of them, but he was fearful of the hurricane - he had never experienced such a thing. There was nothing more frightening to him than the thought that his world might change or, worse, be destroyed - and he knew that this was what was happening. He did not know why, just that it was and that he could do nothing to stop it. For the first time in his short life, he began to cry. And it was through these tears that he witnessed the destructive force of the hurricane that was to take everything he knew and loved away from him forever.

He saw the flames of the stove reach out to the drapes. He watched in fascinated horror as the the wind pushed the flames up the ceiling, as the heat ignited the dry weather-beaten wooden walls opposite him. The angry fire rapidly worked its way from the kitchen to the other side of the room, igniting the hammocks into funeral pyres without bodies. Black smoke churned inside the burning shack and, in an instant, filled the room in a thick, choking cloud. Kieran could not breath, but he did not leave his place behind the wall near the doorway, so fearful was he of the tumult outside his home. And just before the comforting embrace of unconsciousness overcame him, he heard the splintering sound of the old cypress tree crashing through the shack. The fire was soon extinguished by the rain, but he did not see it happen. 

Kieran remained unconscious for many hours after the cataclysm that destroyed his world. He never knew that the only part of the shack remaining after the hurricane, was the single wooden stilt that held up the tiny bit of floor upon which he lay. The entire shack, save that single post, was gone. It was as if God himself had intervened to ensure his safety, cupping his protective hands around him. Not a single one of the cypress trees near the shack had survived the wrath of the event. And later, although the crow led them there, his rescuers did not actually need the bird’s guidance, for the post was the only thing in that part of the swamp that had remained standing. They found him and they took Kieran Renaud away from the only world he had known.