Watch Me Drown

I moved to Las Vegas, Nevada last summer. I haven't been in the state a year and yet, the journey toward my new home became the first chapter to my new novel. A prequel to Hear Me Scream. Here's a chapter one snippet:

The faded mountains in the distance, and the clouds looming above the green-yellow grass fooled no one. Baya Baez drove down the desolate highway aware of the hot sun’s mistreatment of the desert. It scolded and battered nature without recess. His old caravan was the only ground vehicle cruising down Utah’s vast landscape, the AC buzzing as often as the tires hissed from constant contact with burning pavement.

The novel takes place way before all the ugliness of Hear Me Scream. Before the world became the post-apocalyptic nightmare of the next novel. It's a tad longer and some of the characters from HMS make special appearances. However, this one does take place decades before the last novel and most of the characters are not born yet. I've been wanting to write this one for years...even before HMS. I always wanted to tell Joshua's story. With this novel, I got the chance to do this and more, like expanding on their world and adding some politics into the mix. I bring a new set of characters who have their own distinctive little issues. No one's perfect. So to sum up the premise, here it is:

      

     In a world still reeling from the aftereffects of multiple wars, an economic crash, and the FOY virus, human bareness also threatens to extinguish the remaining population.

     Baya Baez journeys to Las Vegas, Nevada looking to start a new life with his childhood companion, Zemi, and her companion, Lynx, a bobcat. They stumbled upon a man who quickly proves to be all sorts of trouble—a psychic like himself. Baya is sure this strange man found in the hot desert will be the death of him. 

     Liatris Lowell loses her job as a counseling psychologist to a schizophrenic terrorist. The patient has escaped the maximum security military bunker, and all fingers are pointed at her. She cannot explain how he fled or how she allowed him to do so. Her answers come in the form of an immensely rich doctor and his strange cure to global bareness. 

     Robbed of almost a decade of his life, Joshua Sorrow escapes into a present where he is either mankind’s last hope or their ultimate demise. No one believes he can travel through time or that the FOY virus is not finished ravaging the world or that the cure to bareness will bring forth an offspring capable of destroying the last of the human race. 

    Everyone takes Joshua’s claims as the ramblings of a clinically unsound man, and so he watches in anger as his world drowns.

I finished Watch Me Drown in December and I'm currently editing. And if you are wondering what inspired Hear Me Scream or the Sorrow Series, well, many things. Also, these sage words: