heyyyy, i published a novella!

 For once, we're not starting a new series with this one--though, to be honest, if I end up putting out three more novellas, I may as well put out a bindup of them as well, but for now, we've just got the one--but I did just publish a novella! It's available on Amazon, and the Goodreads is here, if you're interested in adding it there. 

This is my attempt at a school shooting novel. Obviously, I failed, because it's a novella, and not a novel. But it's something that I've been thinking about for a while, and novella seemed to fit best for this one. It's more immediate, and it doesn't drag it out unnecessarily. As well as this, because it's a novella, the paperback is only 7$. It's only 100 pages, I'm not going to ask for fifteen dollars for that small of a book. If I end up doing a bind-up at some point, that will be the fifteen dollars. 

So, below--cover, synopsis, first page. 

When Jackson Friedmann moved to Lakewood, he did not expect Garret Henderson.

At first, he seems like a normal kid--a little dark sometimes, but he's a seventeen-year-old in the age of the internet, so Jackson figures it's normal. Even though Garret's favorite subject is Columbine, the 1999 school shooting that shocked the nation into a new age. Even though in Jackson, Garret's found the perfect person to share his most intense, his deadliest plans with.

Because Jackson, insecure and looking for meaning, might be more susceptible than he thinks.

Chapter One

On April 20, 1999, two assholes in Colorado shot up their school. They killed a bunch of people. Injured a bunch of people. Made a whole lotta other people really suspicious of kids in trenchcoats who listened to heavy metal.

            That was all I knew about Columbine before Garret Henderson.

_

The summer before my senior year, my parents got divorced. It wasn’t exactly a huge shock, but I guess I’d figured that they’d stick it out due to convenience, if nothing else. Either way, my dad got the house and my mom got a big chunk of cash and me—and she decided, with this cash (and me), she was going to move to small-town North Dakota. So she found a cheap house in Lakewood, North Dakota, population around fifteen hundred, smack-dab in-between Jamestown and Valley City, right off of I-94—and now I was going to be graduating from bumfuck nowhere, North Dakota.

            So like, it sucked.

            We moved in mid-July, and I spent the rest of summer vacation moping around, playing video games, and avoiding my mom as much as possible. It wasn’t hard. She immediately found a job at the local library and got in real good with the church ladies, so she was pretty busy distancing herself from the fact that she’d just divorced her husband of twenty-three years to pay all that much attention to me. I was fine with it. I guess if I had to pick, I got along better with my mom than my dad, but that was also just because I knew her better. My dad had a good job, and by good job, I mean, he made a lot of cash and was never home and was probably involved in several illegal rings of whatever—you know, the shit rich white guys are always into. Child porn, or whatever.