I came up with the idea for Ronald in May of 2013, around fifty-two thousand nine hundred and thirty hours ago. I didn’t begin any real work on it until NaNoWriMo that year, where I plowed through the first draft, start to finish. It was, like any NaNo result, just okay. December 2013 began with that promise of cleaning it up but the month was soon swallowed up by Christmas and I never went back to it.

This work comes with a few personal pain points. The first is that the story starts in the year 2020. The astute reader might notice that 2020 was waaaaay off in the future when I first set proverbial pen to paper. But the fact that my novel “set in the near future” is about to be set in the present hurts a little.

Another pain point comes from my feet-dragging, wherein I let other writers steal all my good ideas. For example, back in 1994 I wrote a story about a large passenger ship sinking in the North Atlantic in 1912. Then three years later James Cameron makes a movie using my idea.

But in all seriousness, Ronald shares a couple basic story points with two films currently playing. And even though I actually did come up with this six years ago, my feet-dragging will make look like I didn’t. On the bright side, though, since I’ve now officially given up, I don’t care about that any more. 🙂

I’m still not sure how long this novel will be, if it ends up being a novel at all. At this point I could see it being anything from ten to forty thousand words, depending how detailed I want to make it. The current draft contains a half dozen chapters or so, but they’re all very short. That used to bother me, but now it doesn’t, because it is what it is.

So without any more senseless babbling, I present Chapter One, all five hundred and forty-five words of it:

One final thought. Someone early on told me that “Ronald” by itself wasn’t a good book title since it didn’t really convey anything about the story. While I can see that, I can also see that didn’t seem to slow down Hamlet, Emma, Papillon, Carrie, Coraline, etc. Still, I renamed it to Ronald and the Curious Bookshop last fall and since then I’ve been quite happy with the change.

Featured Image Photo Credit: Henry Be