Before I start, I’d like to say that I was going to upstate New York but Grandma’s sick again and I’d rather be in the state in the case that something happens. Although she’s 96 and odds are, unless I stay in this God-forsaken city after 2008, I’m going to outlive her, not having her is a tough pill to swallow.
Anyway, I hate when Ma tells me things at the worst possible time (like she always does) because I couldn’t really concentrate for the rest of today and did a crappy job of writing an article (which was going to be bad to begin with because I need to stop going into events and such completely cold; I’ve been doing that for the past couple weeks). But nothing’s happened yet so I need to not worry about it and get back to improving my reporting.
My articles are OK but I feel that I need to step it up. I can write a lot better than what I’m giving them now. I experimented with scene setting with one article this week and bought a collection of my favorite author’s newspaper articles for some pointers.
On top of that, I’m revising my book from the start again (finally) and I just completed the rough draft of the first chapter of a companion book, “Presumed Implicated.” You may hear me call it “Presuntos Implicados” because I got the name of the book from the Spanish band by that name. The companion book takes place in 2005 (the novel is set in 1999 and the sequel’s in 2009, which is all the reason to get the novel done by 2009). It’s based off a day when I was working at Kohl’s and found a cell phone.
The first, very rough, most-likely-will-be-highly-altered-in-the-futures draft is under the cut. I hope you like it at this very unpolished stage and will consider buying it in the future. Although it doesn’t say yet, the protagonist is Lorenzo Williamston, of course; the plot of this doesn’t affect the story arc of the main novel and the sequel; I don’t exactly know the plot all the way through and the setting is actually Gosnold’s Hope because Lorenzo eventually went to college at Bartholomew Gosnold University there. Gosnold’s Hope is his universe’s Newport News — other than that, the difference between the two universes is that Imperial City and his family exists, my family and I do not, Kohl’s is Bollingbrook’s and 145,000 people in the U.S. have been allocated to populate the extra city. The current location is exactly where this entry ends.
So without further ado, Chapter One

