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Synopsis | Background | Writing Inventory The novella, The First Twenty Steps, The First Twenty Steps is
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The
First Twenty Steps
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Synopsis | Background | Writing Inventory
The novella, The First Twenty Steps,
and all writing on this page copyright 2011 by Michael D. SmithThe First Twenty Steps is available as an eBook from:
amazon.com for the Kindle
barnesandnoble.com for the Nook
Harry, released from six years in prison in One-West, proves that his old reflexes are sound as he fights off thugs who try to rob him on his first day of freedom. Unsure how to meet basic needs, Harry knows he needs to figure out a way to buy a new chopper and head back to Drulgoorijk and his old motorcycle gang, the Defenders, and his best friend Danny.
Deciding to celebrate in a hotel bar, Harry finds a kindred spirit in Roberta, but discovers she’s in thrall to a One-West motorcycle gang, the Cerberean Knights, headed by a passive-aggressive tyrant, Alexander. Falling in love, Harry decides he must help her.
In plotting to stay together and eventually free her from this gang, Harry and Roberta plan to infiltrate Harry into the Knights, but when Alexander announces that the gang will commit a major crime this evening to pay back favors from the corrupt city council of One-West, Harry realizes that their plan was doomed all along, that he and Roberta have compromised their love by their contact with Alexander’s evil.
The motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal. Harry and Roberta find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by another biker gang belonging to the mysterious One-West billionaire Richard Mullein, who intervenes to protect the top secret navigational equipment for his Cathedral Spaceship.
Danny, now working for Mullein, reminds Harry how they used to laugh about how bikers and other outsiders could climb a transcendent catwalk twenty steps above common suffering humanity, which they could then regard from a cynical, superior distance. Talented in biker gangs and computer hacking, yet clueless as to how to survive in the new society he’s returned to, Harry must come to grips with the arrogance of his “first twenty steps.”
The First Twenty Steps came from a decades-old dream in which I was a member of a ruthless commune swooping down from helicopters to attack and occupy a fifty-nine story office building deep in the city, deep in the night. Yet I’d always thought of “59” as unwritable. It was a buried dream, plotless, wordless, full of power, recalled only months or years after it actually took place. What on earth were “we” doing attacking that building?
The ex-prisoner is loosed onto the streets of the western city, confronting the Cathedral Spaceship that, locked away, he’s never seen before. The released prisoner is the central myth of this novella. Freed at last, he confronts his twenty-first step.
There are two older paintings, The First Twenty Steps (here), originally considered for a cover, and The Second Twenty Steps.
The last revision of this novella was 2010-2011. Its master Word document is 96 pages, 25,730 words (Times New Roman 12).
Placing this novella for sale on PubIt is an experiment. I want to see how e-publishing works and I regard this short work as one of my best plots. I’m not intending to self-publish all my novels in this manner, but I do want to put this contribution out there and see what happens. And since the PubIt site asks me to name my “publishing house,” why naturally I settled on Sortmind Publishing. It could be that one day in the future Sortmind Publishing will expand into a bona fide publishing concern, who knows? I have quite a lot to learn about the epub document format and e-publishing in general.
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11/24/11
