The Opening to My Novel
I'm half done writing my first novel, "The Last Generation." Here's the opening.
The year is 2028.
Technology and cancel culture had fornicated and their bastard love child is rampaging across America, shutting people down.
Every citizen born after 2010 has a crypto digital ID. First hundreds, then thousands, then scores of thousands, are waking up to find their lives destroyed.
The canceled scrape by on the edges of society; some find each other and form little leper colonies.
Religion is a whisper. The family is dead.
Most had given in.
Most, not all.
***
That’s a sneak peek for all of you of the beginning of my novel, "The Last Generation." Needless to say, it’s anti-smartphone. Anti-tech.
And this book is a big reason I don’t do as many of these Substack posts right now. But stay with me. I’ll still be posting in the future about the downsides of smartphones, how to actually wean yourself off, and also some excerpts from my book.
A little backstory.
At the beginning of 2021, I thought, "Hey. I haven't written a short story in years."
I had a character and a simple idea and thought maybe it would be 10 pages...
550 book pages later ... Yikes!
So I paused in late August to figure out what the heck I had written so far. I was losing the plot. I needed to spend some time really figuring out where I was going with this thing.
In Sept, I printed it and read everything I had straight through, no editing, to get a sense of it.
In Oct, I pencil edited the hardcopy manuscript. (A total grind.)
In Nov, I installed the edits into the Word document of the draft.
In Dec, I created a chapter summary of everything I had, am polishing it, merging chapters, cutting and preparing to write again in January.
It's been a rewarding project but I had no intention of it becoming this big. I still feel a little like I'm swimming in the middle of the Pacific, waiting for some kind of ship to bail me out. No ship yet, so my best strategy I can think of is to just keep swimming.
I'm planning to finish the first draft in the spring.
I can't wait to share it with everyone after I get some other eyes on it!
https://youtu.be/jQE66WA2s-A