Around 15 years ago, we had a family vacation visiting the East Coast. We spent a few days in Washington, D.C., and a few days in New York City. A day at Gettysburg (not near enough time), and a few days in upstate New York. The missus spent a part of her childhood there and one of her best friends from that time still lives in the area. In a small town. Northville. On the banks of the Great Sacandaga in the Adirondacks.

While we were on this trip, I kept a notebook of things I saw and observed, thinking they might become things I could include in a story at some point. For instance, we were driving from Northville to NYC and my younger son said he saw a cloud that looked like a rubber ducky with a sailor hat on. This eventually became a small line in The Dime.

At some point after we returned, I saw a prompt that went something like this. A store clerk catches a shoplifter and offers a deal to keep the shoplifter from being reported to the police. My first thoughts about the deal all revolved around an exchange of sex for freedom. And I wasn’t interested in writing that story. I wanted to do something that might not be expected.

So, I thought about it and came up with the idea for The Dime. The deal is that the shoplifter has to ask the store clerk’s sister to the end of the year dance at the local high school. While I was developing that idea, I also needed to come up with a location and setting. I landed on Northville because (a) I had just been there and the place was still fresh in my head; and (b) they have the oldest still operating Five and Dime store in the country.

I wrote the first chapters, what I thought would be the extent of the story. I moved on to other things.

But a few months later, I went to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference in Fort Bragg, California. I hadn’t been to Fort Bragg since I was a small child and I immediately fell in love with the area. The northern coast of California is incredible. Dynamic, filled with small towns, lighthouses, rugged beaches where waves crash. If I could live there, I would.

But … the conference. Well, I signed up for and was accepted into a group of 12 writers who spent the three mornings of the conference in a workshop with Peter Orner. Each of us were to submit approximately 10 pages of our writing. I submitted what I had written about the store clerk, the shoplifter, and the deal. Thinking I would get feedback on what I thought would be a short story.

Each morning, four of had to run the gauntlet of comments and criticism from the other writers and Orner’s typically positive comments. It was an interesting and supportive experience. And, for some reason, Orner left my story for the very end. One of the things I did was write each of those chapters in first person but from a different character’s perspective. The first chapter was from the clerk’s perspective, while the second was from the shoplifter’s perspective. Ornery liked that.

The other writers had generally positive comments about what I had written, with one giving me a phrase I had never heard before to describe what my story might be getting at … a found family. I liked that idea so much and because of the positive feedback, I decided to extend the story. To write a novella about the characters.

Thus was born my contemporary young adult novel about a found family and that does not include any vampires or werewolves or other mythical creatures. It is about nothing more than three youngsters trying to get through the trauma of their lives and find a path forward. Together. Lily and Sophie are sisters, orphaned because of a car accident that killed their parents, paralyzed Sophie from the waist down, and left Lily with internal scars. Peter is the new kid in town, riddled with self-doubt and insecurities, and living with his abusive father and mother, whose neglect may just have been worse than the abuse his father inflicted on him.

I wrote the novella I had in mind, covering their lives over the course of one year, and then realized that there was more story to tell. I kept writing, eventually completing a three-part novel that covered three years in the lives of Lily, Sophie, and Pete. Each part being a novella length story of a year in their lives.

In some ways, this may be one of the easier longer stories I’ve written. When I found the time to exist in the world of The Dime, the writing came pretty easy, and I enjoyed the writing. Which isn’t always the case.

There came a point towards the end when I thought that I could keep writing about these characters for some time. That there was plenty more story to tell about them. I mean, after three years, Sophie and Pete were just graduating from high school and they would have plenty of life left to live. At the same time, as much as I enjoyed writing their story, I also knew myself. I would eventually get bored with them and need something new. Instead of continuing to write until I got to that point, I put them to the side and looked to other stories.

I know that I need to come back to The Dime at some point. I ended it with something that left some loose ends that need to be addressed. I’ve started writing the next part of the story and have a few chapters, and it may be the next thing I move to — to finish it, at least for now, and give some readers the ending they deserve. We’ll see.

Anyway, where can you get The Dime. Just like with almost everything else, pretty much anywhere books are published — both paperback and ebooks.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Harvard Bookstore

Smashwords

Powells Books