I need to build a page of these for the site, so I figure I’ll try to pique your curiosity over the next couple of weeks at the same time. If you want to read Chapters 1 and 2, you can begin here. To peek at Chapters 3, 4, and 5, sign up for my email list here.

EXCERPTS

As with the book, there’s a “bad language and adult themes” warning. There’s nothing explicit here, though.

Molly was not always enthusiastic about her father’s new life, but at least she was part of it. This was more than many kids with divorced parents could say. Besides, she blamed her mother for everything, although she was not above despising her stepmother for things like loving The Six Million Dollar Man and wanting all her bathroom accessories to match.

He watched the hemlock boughs sway overhead and flicked the occasional ant away from his thighs. Would there be grief in the ant hill tonight? Or would the ants just keep doing their ant business, oblivious to their losses? Did ants ever try to lay guilt trips on each other: Hey, asshole, I took a hell of a lot better care of the Queen than you ever did!

Molly gulped down the rest of her punch. She liked the peculiar sensation of warmth it was giving her, the odd little swoop of something like going over a bump in the road and becoming airborne.

“It’s okay to use the phone here, isn’t it?” She had decided it was time to call her dad and bail out of this situation.

“No need, we’re moving on, too,” Kim said. “Gina’s going to take us back, right, Gina?”

“Sure,” Gina said.

“How soon?”

“Soon as we finish Gina’s face. Hey, let’s do yours, too!”

“No, that’s all right,” Molly said quickly. Kim was even less judicious with make-up than she was with criticism of her parents. Gina’s heavily-penciled eyes made her look like a raccoon on the make.

She handed him his mug and sat down next to him.

“Decided to give it a try?” he asked.

She nodded and took a tentative sip – and screwed up her face in disgust. It was so much worse than she’d expected! How could something that smelled so good taste so bad? Still, she took another sip. It wasn’t quite as bad when she knew what to expect.

“A lot of people take it with cream and sugar.”

Why even bother with it in the first place, she wondered? But perhaps it was one of those things adults were just expected to develop a taste for, like Brussels sprouts and oral sex.

David stared at his knees, trying to come up with something that might sound a little more plausible. “My housekeeper has the most wonderful ass,” he blurted, then thought oh fuck. He certainly hadn’t meant to say that.

The other patients sat up, suddenly interested.

“Your housekeeper?” Rob’s eyes glittered.

His face was burning, which wasn’t going to help at all. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Oh yes you did,” Rob said. “Tell us about this housekeeper.”

“There was nothing to tell. I didn’t mean it. She’s only sixteen, for God’s sake.”

Breaths got sucked in all around the circle. “Fucking A,” Arnold said, clearly approving.

“How’d you end up with a sixteen-year-old housekeeper?” another guy from across the circle asked. He sounded envious. “You use a service or something?”

“She was my daughter’s babysitter.”

“Holy crap,” Arnold said. “You want to fuck your dead daughter’s babysitter?”

“I do not! Shut the fuck up!”

Arnold gave him a toothy grin. “Hey, I’m not blaming ya, buddy.”

Timothy sniffed. “You can get thrown in jail for that kind of thing.”

“I would never lay a finger on her,” David said.

“Yet her ass makes life worth living,” Rob said.

Pre-order the book for only $2.99!

A note to friends and fans: If you’re planning to order it someday, your pre-order is absolutely the best way to give this book a good shot at success. All those pre-orders are counted on the day of release, which gives the book a shot at real visibility on Amazon. On the other hand, with purchases trickling in after release, the general public will never know it’s there.

(Also, I will probably increase the price to $3.99 after a time. And this one I don’t dare offer for free, so don’t hold out any hope for that. I’d get too many indignant condemnations from people who download every free book without reading the warnings in the product description.)

For those of you who only read paper, I should have a pre-ordering link up in the next few weeks.