So I hope you’ll forgive me if I continue posting extremely rough and inconsistent chapters between now and the honeymoon. I’d love to give you something more polished, but that’s just not possible right now. Anyway, hopefully this and the other chapters like it will tide you over until my schedule normalizes at the end of June. Thanks for bearing with me, reader. Have a great long weekend!

Chapter 6

Chapter 5

Anyway, who cares? You’re not checking in to read a finished product. Right? You’re just here to read about Furries and rednecks shooting at each other. Well, dear reader, the wait is over…

Chapter 4

But other than that, hey, it’s kind of fun. Hopefully it won’t be too confusing and cumbersome. I’ll pare it down and clean it up eventually, I promise. For now, please enjoy your first peak into the subplot of Dub’s mysterious dead mother.

Chapter 3

Chapter 2

To you, dear reader, I’d like to wish a happy read. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a happy read, anyway. Of all the chapters I’ve thrown together this year, I’m least confident in Chapter 1. My biggest fear right now is that I’ve spent too many months picking at it, and now it’s this jumbled mass of clunky words. I’ve been told by any number of writers and aspiring writers that the first chapter is always the most difficult. Some choose to not even write it until the rest of the project is complete. But that’s not me, man. I like to set the stage in my mind and on the paper as early as possible. Shit, though, reader. I had no idea it was going to be this difficult to find satisfaction with what I’ve done.

So yeah, I’m calling this “Version 17″ of Chapter 1, but the truth is, there’ve probably been more versions than that. Problem has been that every time I return to this chapter to reference whether I have or haven’t said something about a character or situation, I wind up spending three hours revising it. In the end, it’s been one hell of a tremendous time-suck. In a way, I’m excited to post it today because I feel like maybe posting it for all to read will provide some small measure of closure on the matter. But then, in another way, I’m terrified to post it because (as I said) I’m not nearly as confident in its quality as I am with the rest of my chapters.

But I leave final judgment to you. Here it is then, reader, in all its heavily revised glory:

Chapter 1 (Version 17)

So you might be wondering by now why in the world I’m actually posting to this site on a random Monday afternoon. I say to you, reader, that it’s not so very random. Well okay, yeah, it’s random. But at least this particular Monday is connected to the week of an important date in my little life. This very week, dear reader — Thursday, in fact — marks the one-year anniversary of the day I first departed Florida City along the long road home. One year! This particular chunk of time has been a strange one for me, in that the day I first began the walk simultaneously seems like yesterday and forty-five years ago. This has to have been one of the most eventful years of my life. More eventful, maybe, than the entire decade that came before it. To cram so much busyness and goodness into such a small window, well shit, that’s how 365 days can feel like a blink of an eye and a generational epoch in one instance. But here now, reader, it’s almost here. The anniversary of my departure.

You might have noticed that the title of this post indicates anniversary-related plans. Good eye (as ever), reader. I do indeed have plans for this Thursday. And here they are: This Thursday, I will post the new and (theoretically) improved Chapter 1 of my manuscript. Then, for nine Thursdays thereafter, I will post an additional new and (theoretically) improved chapter of my manuscript. That’s ten chapters in all. I know, I know. “A chapter a week.” You’ve heard this one before. Only difference is that this time around, I’m actually finished with the first ten chapters, and so there won’t be anything to deter me from posting. That’s more than 150 pages in all, dear reader. And it represents the entirety of Book 1 (which I’m calling — you’ll never see this one coming — “What We’ve Got.”). You might feel like you’ve read many of these chapters before. True. You have read four of them. But you haven’t read them in their new and (theoretically) improved states. I think you’ll find that, whether you believe them to be improved or not, each chapter will at least be dramatically different from the versions you’ve read in the past. That’s what I’ve been doing all winter and spring, you see: making broad-sweeping changes to these first ten chapters.

In any case, if you’re one of the twelve people who still checks in to this humble site on a daily basis, first I want to thank you, and second I want to promise weekly reading material from this Thursday until the Thursday before our wedding (see the serendipity there?). And even if that reading material turns out to suck, at least you’ll have something to pass the time on that greatest of swing days, Thursday. Thanks for hanging in there, reader. I hope you’ll like what you read.

I shouldn’t worry, I know. These vets do these surgeries every day. But I’ll still be keeping my fingers crossed all morning — and I hope you will too, reader. I’ll update you again later with the outcome.