The first one was easy.  I know that's not what you're supposed to say, but, well, tough shit.  I was in my last year of college, and I had to have a thesis to graduate, as they say, with Honors.  A lot of my colleagues did important things.  They researched chemicals, they restored houses, they designed mind-bending graphical interfaces for software.  I was a bartender trying to form a band and finish up my degree while at the same time spending an inordinate amount of time trying to stay sane while a girl kept dragging me towards a nightmarish cliff where we would jump--together, please, baby!--into black romantic insanity and the sea below.  So I didn't really have time to study quarks and gluons or do the kinds of research necessary to analyze gay Victorian poets.  Not that I don't like quarks and gluons, or gay Victorian poets, for that matter...I just felt like doing something more, what's the word...self-indulgent.  On the University's tab, no less. 

And this...thing, this double-spaced, 12-point, multi-paged thing just flew out of me.  I was weaving gold out of the straw of my life.  I would sit down and write 5,000 words, then go to the Zephyr and drink myself onto the floor, carefree and lighthearted.

I wrote that first one in about three months.  Well, that's the amount of time the whole thing spanned across.  Actual time commitment?  I'd say about 20 hours. 

Not that I won a Pulitzer or anything.  Not that someone heard about it and called me up and begged me for the paperback rights.  But now I had this three-hundred page, soul-encapsulated thing that my friends were passing around.  I'd made something, and it felt like a calling.

Fast forward a year.  My diploma is keeping the coffee table level.  I'm working in a candle store, peddling rose-scented pillars of wax to grandmas and confused males looking to make things right with their girls.  My girl's gone.  I'm sleeping on a couch in an unfamiliar city.  I haven't written a damn thing since graduation except entries in a schizophrenic livejournal and an e-mail to this guy named Nacho Sasha.

One crazy night, he was drunk on Five Alive and tequila and he invited me to shape up a livejournal entry about the Red Sox for his website, of which I was a fan.  I don't think I slept for three days.  I was that excited.  I spent hours pouring over this thousand-word Hunter S. Thompson rip-off essay, trying to make it perfect.  And, Goddammit, Nacho posted it.  The bug was back.  I wanted to write more.  Nacho gave me promises...he said I'd be facing misery, rejection, eventual Ultimate Pessimism.  I ignored him and started writing again. 

Fast forward another year.  My diploma is pulling coaster duty.  I'm working in a bunker for a data storage company.  Still no steady love.  But I've got my own room now, and my own beautiful computer, and I've spent so many sleepless nights wondering where my life is going that I've finally decided to do something...I've decided to try that novel thing again, for serious this time. 

But this time around, I'm not living that adrenaline-poisoned college life anymore.  I live in the fifth safest city in America and eat healthy.  I got no band, no axe-wielding lover, no Gestapo professors breathing down my back.  I'm living in comfort, and this is the only reason I can think of that the words aren't coming as easy anymore. 

That, or maybe the story I've chosen to tell is too big for me, too ambitious, a rock face I'm trying to scale without any guide. 

Eh, fuck it.  I'm doing it anyway.  I'm plugging along, I'm getting it done.  When I'm ready to edit and revise it, I'll be older, wiser, and maybe hip-deep in lunacy again.  I am, after all, moving to New Orleans. 

Anyway, Nacho, once my benefactor and patron, is now demanding restitution.  He says I can't have time off to work on a book unless I give him something to fill the empty spaces on GS.  I gave him a few options; he shunned them all, yelling at me through his cell phone.  We called each other names, insulted each other's ancestors, mailed each other anthrax.  He wouldn't accept my epic poem about the Hebrews wandering in the desert that I pulled out of the archives.  I refused to write ten how-to articles about sexual positions.  Finally, after ten weeks of McCartney-Lennon-esque bickering, we worked something out.  I'd let him have some preliminary writing I'd done for the book, and he'd do the dishes and mow the lawn for two weeks. 

So, I said all that to say this, I guess: consider yourselves lucky.  Yeah, you get a lot of Cassander magic here, but this is still rare.  Parting with something like this, letting peering eyes get a glimpse of something I'm working heart-and-soul on is not an easy thing for me.  I'm a paranoid mess when it comes to people reading my stuff, especially if it's not finished.  Of course, I'm also a megalomaniac, so some nights I lie in bed giggling because I know that what you are getting is only slightly indicative of the actual novel.  Ideally, it'll leave you hungry for more or, at the least, willing to introduce me to your hot cousin. 

So what is it?  It's a sliver, a backstory, a zero issue, if you will.  A long short story?  A mini-novella?  I don't know what to call it except a New Beginning.  This is your introduction to Ghost and Brooklyn, and the strange undercurrents of depravity that exist in Ohio, a state that prides itself on its wealth of wholesome Americana. 

Critics are calling it "Breathtaking" and "A pulse-pounding thrill ride!"

My mom says its too dirty for her.

Nacho says its a temporary distraction and that I'll be back to writing lowest-common-denominator pap by the fall.

I say, hey, at least you don't have to pay for it. 

Please enjoy.

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Note: Ghost and Brooklyn will be hitting GS in June.  Stay tuned!