500 Patrons!

Well, the counter says it's 500, and while I'm sure the number will probably drop back below that once the month ends, it's still quite the sizable marker, and deserves to be celebrated. The next chapter of Before The Storm will drop either tonight or tomorrow, but until then, this should keep everyone busy for a bit. ;)

Attached to this post you'll find both a PDF version and an EPub version of an unpublished novel I wrote back in 2015/2016 called Nothing Beats Rock. Here's the pitch paragraph I used to shop it around:

The telekinetic spy known as Rock thinks he's just erased his own mind to allow him to go on the run from Watchtower, the agency he works for, who, incidentally, just tried to kill him. Unsure of who to trust, especially himself, he's determined to find out who's really calling the shots over at Watchtower, but his former co-workers, the psychic known as Paper and the invisible man known as Scissors, have been dispatched to catch him, by any means necessary. The only thing Rock has to go on are prerecorded memories, instructions left behind for him to use, locked away within his mind, dug up and played back whenever his subconscious seems to think he needs help. A blend of The Bourne Identity, Memento and The X-Men, Nothing Beats Rock is a thriller that proves sometimes you can't even trust yourself.

I did a very light/quick edit pass just to clean up some very obvious typos while I was formatting it into EPUB format, but keep in mind, this is nearly a decade old. I tried shopping it around a couple of times, back in 2016, when I finished the second draft, and again in 2018, but couldn't seem to get any of the publishing houses to bite. 

Book publishing is a weird game, and I've gotten extremely close a number of times, but haven't seemed to find one of the big companies who wanted to buy any of my novels. 

(Not counting Quaranteam, I've written a handful of books, none of which have been picked up, despite me regularly pitching them, and despite a couple of them having basically fallen apart at the contract negotiation part right at the very finish line.) 

NBR was written in response to a fellow creative and I bitching about how so many people were doing 'amnesia stories,' but weren't really doing anything interesting with the concept. I gave Bourne Identity a pass, since the book had been written in 1980, and said that I liked how both Memento and Total Recall had approached the idea, but how nobody had really dug into the idea as well as I wanted to in fiction, beyond maybe Philip K. Dick's story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," which was (very loosely) the basis for the Total Recall movies. My friend suggested I work on the idea while I was sitting around waiting to be needed, during a point in my life when I was doing a lot of that, so I did.  

The result was Nothing Beats Rock.

The book reads better than I remember it being, and the rotating perspective approach doesn't feel (to me, anyway) like a gimmick, which made me feel more comfortable with letting the project escape its cage. (Each of the three characters is written in a different way -- Rock from 1st person present perspective, Paper from 3rd person past perspective, and Scissors from 1st person past perspective.) The ending might still be a little rushed and the primary antagonist may still come across a bit too mustache twirly (highly technical term) but I think the project's worth letting people see, and maybe you'll get some enjoyment out of it.

It's 95k words long, so don't feel like you need to blow through it all as fast as you can. I created a channel on the Discord for people who want to talk about it, barring in mind you should probably use the spoiler tag for the first week or two. There aren't any plans to revisit the story in the immediate future, although I suppose if there was interest in purchasing a print copy of it, I could probably make that happen.

Anyway, have at it. See what you think. And thanks for being around to support my work. It means more than I can tell you that you're willing to help me survive as a writer. Enjoy!