Mind Trap officially sold its first copy today! No doubt from the help of my friends reading their free copies and putting honest reviews on its respective Amazon page.

Since I'm feeling so good, I've decided to share the beginning of a new story with you all--a heightened-realism romance. While it's not my current project, some day I do plan to release the completed version.

As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy!





The hospital room is dark, and as quiet as it’s ever been. Maddy’s heart monitor beeps in long intervals, the little green graph etching across a black screen. I am in a chair I’ve pulled close to her bed, and I have her unmoving hand in mine. Her skin is so white that it’s almost translucent now... her veins as thin as her hair.
“My Maddy,” I whisper to her, leaning forward with my elbows on the edge of her bed. My eyes water at the memories of her. All the time we spent together during our young lives... and all the time we missed, during pointless arguments, it all whirls together into a single emotional blur. “Oh... my Maddy.”
On the closest nightstand is a photograph of us, young, in love, conscious. Our smiles are huge, our eyes are small, and our hair as dark as rivers of red wine--a strong contrast to what the years have done. We’ve both gone silver. Our smiles are not so big now, and our eyes don’t squint with happiness as easily as they used to. Our skin is no longer tight against our bones--it is folded, and sagging, and wrinkled. The youthful spark in our eyes has dulled into a mere shadow of all we know.
I’m the only one ever here now, in the hospital. At first, people cared. They visited often, bringing flowers and chocolates and stroking back her hair with gentle hands. They consoled me, though they needn’t. People were more understanding when Maddy first got admitted. They were hopeful. Everyone knew she’d get better, that someday she’d wake up.
Weeks passed, months went by, and as the years added up, Maddy’s caring crowd thinned. The flowers died, shriveled, and disappeared. The bright boxes of chocolates first went empty, and then were never refilled. The nurses went from checking on us twice a day to twice a week, into once a month. Everyone but me was giving up their hope.
Everyone but me had fallen out of love.
I read her her favorite books. They were mostly romances, and most of them made me laugh with their sappy plots. And every time I’d laugh, I’d look up from the pages, and pretend Maddy had crooked her mouth into the slightest smile to laugh along with me.
Sometimes the passages brought up painful feelings. Some authors were real jerks for stirring those types of emotions--the ones I hate to feel, the ones that form cold fingers around your heart, the ones that summon something swelling deep inside your throat. These were the times I paused to grab for Maddy’s hand, and squeeze. I’d take my glasses off and study her dormant face. I could still see her youth under all the years--that girl I met so long ago, that girl that stole my heart. The girl that changed my life.
With Maddy’s heart monitor bleeping intermittently, and with my hand massaging hers, I felt the past come rushing forward from the back of my mind. A tidal wave of memories. I was not trying to relive our lives... something deeper had taken hold of the wheel... something that wished to remind me how good the world used to feel.Read Sample