Well, tomorrow my first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is officially published, meaning it’s the day that I go from being an almost published novelist to a published novelist. How am I feeling about that? Pretty darn good.
So I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that while my first book may not be the kind of book that flies off the shelves right from the get go — hey, there’s no vampires, wizards, or other strange paranormal activity going on here, just two boys who steal their Principal’s car and end up on a life-changing adventure — I really believe it’s the kind of book that if people read the first page, they’ll have a hard time putting it down. Maybe not everyone — taste is a subjective thing — but a lot of people.
Of course, my friend challenged me to post my first page online to back up my words. So here it is, the first page of my first book:
The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys
by Scott William Carter
If I’m going to tell you how I killed this kid, I can’t start on the day it happened. It won’t make any sense, and you’ll just think I was some psycho teenage boy with glue for brains. No, the whole thing really started three days earlier, on Monday, which made it bad straight off. It was also raining, which made it even worse.
In fact, it was raining so hard that my tennis shoes were soaked before I even walked two blocks from our house. Not just kind of wet, either, but really soaked in that way your socks get all squishy and your feet make those mucky sounds each time you take a step. Muck, muck, muck, all through the halls, everybody staring at you like you’ve just turned into a human squid. Back then, before all the crazy stuff happened, most kids looked at me as if I was a human squid anyway. I figured that’s what they’d put in the senior yearbook, if they remembered to put anything in there about me at all: Charlie Hill, Most Likely To Be a Human Squid For the Rest of His Life.
If it sounds bad, that’s because it was. If you want to read a nice, happy little story where everything turns out all neat and tidy in the end, you should go read some Hardy Boys or something. This isn’t that kind of story.
Not that everything that happened that Monday was bad. About halfway to the school, I realized I had probably missed the bus on purpose.
Want to read more? You can buy it right now from Amazon.com for only $11.46.
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