Every novel I’ve written has started as a NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) project, but this November I decided to do something a little different. Instead of writing a novel I’m writing a collection of short stories, one of which will bridge the gap between Small Things and Threads.

Here’s an excerpt from the Small Things novella:

Summer, 1976

In a town the size of Carthage, you notice when someone new moves in — especially when they’re driving a 1937 black Ford Coupe. But it wasn’t the car that worried sixteen-year-old Shawn Spencer, it was the pair of men who owned it: Mr. Kingfisher and Mr. Quarry, who had taken up temporary residence at the Hotel Carthage overlooking the town squarecoupe

Kingfisher was nearly as tall as famed professional wrestler Andre the Giant, while Quarry was maybe 5’2″ on a good day. They wore identical matching black suits, and were supposedly housing developers looking to perhaps build in Carthage.

What made Shawn nervous wasn’t the thought of rising real estate prices or cottages being built around the lake, but that the pair had shown a particular interest in the old Spencer house on Randolph Street, the very same house where he and his girlfriend Jenny McGee had almost been murdered last summer.

 

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From Joe's writing

It was the shank of the summer, when the sun is so hot and the air so humid that it’s all you can do just to suck in air. The green grass had turned a sort of scorched brown, and the trees had grown extra leaves just to replace the ones that had shriveled up and burnt off. The sky was so parched that it refused to rain, and the ground practically turned to dust beneath your feet. That’s how hot it was that summer, and that’s why what happened played out the way that it did.

— Memories of a Ghost, chapter 19