Welcome back to my blog, my lovely readers! To say I am excited about finally releasing The Nameless to the wild would be an understatement. For reasons, I’ve been sitting on this manuscript for months, not-so-patiently awaiting the day I can start sharing it. The time has come!
I’ll be doing several excerpts and other related posts in the coming days, and today I’d like to do a character spotlight. Where better to start than Chance? As is mentioned in the book’s blurb, Chance and Lucky are twins, but they’re not identical twins. Quite the opposite. Where Lucky is the blond-haired, blue-eyed front man of their band, Chance is a brunette with green eyes. Likewise, their personalities are very different.
Chance is dark and broody in a completely different way than any of the other characters I’ve written. Outwardly, he looks like just another young punk rocker with his tattoos and spider bite piercings, but he carries the weight of his long life close to him at all times. The tragedies he has experienced have left deep emotional scars that have never quite healed. The spotlight and the stage are momentary distractions, but they never really reach past the surface.
Chance is the thinker of the two, often times caught up in his own head and suffocated by his emotions. He’s also usually content to be the shadow to Lucky’s shining presence. Consequently, Chance typically plays the role of big brother, though the two are mere hours apart in age.
The excerpt:
It’s close to midnight. I’m a few beers in, this last one compliments of the gaggle of women who have seemingly adopted Lucky and might be competing to try to take him home after last call. I can hear them giggling at him as he tells a story about accidentally putting out a stage light with a drumstick. His story is mostly true and also partially why Lucky doesn’t play the drums. His energy is boundless and their attention is just fuel to the fire.
I’m feeling a lot more low key. The tension from the road is finally starting to ease from my shoulders and neck. Beside me, Becka has kept a steady pace of a conversation with me on an array of general topics from music to travel, drink preferences, all kinds of fairly safe information that isn’t super personal. Still, she’s giving me some insight into a personality that’s intriguing, deep in a way that’s rare among the general public.
On my other side, Johnny is chatting with a couple of guys about humbuckers and bass strings. His gear is one of his favorite topics. It’s almost weird to hear him talk so much. Must be all the free booze.
I catch Becka watching the knot tattoo on my hand again. I check myself in the mirror. My stick-straight, brown hair is poking from beneath my beanie, lying against my neck and cheeks. I’m pale, a product of living mostly at night, playing shows at random bars. Even if my skin does see the sun, it doesn’t really tan so much as burn, thanks to my bloodline.
After you live for so long, you kind of get tired of your own face. If you’re me, you’re kind of tired of everything. But after a few drinks of her own, Becka isn’t shy that she likes what she sees. It’s mutual. She’s attractive, not in a drop-dead movie starlet way. More like she probably doesn’t even know how pretty she is.
This is a dangerous line of thought. For the – obvious to me – reason that I’ll probably outlive everyone in this room except my brother. That shitty reality tends to discourage making friends and especially keeping lovers. Damn, but it has been a while.
I realize that I’m idly staring at the mirror, not at myself, but at her. There’s a bit of color high in her cheeks and she seems to have noticed my attention. She sweeps her dark curls over her shoulder and looks down at her closed notebook.
“So, what do you think of our town so far?” she asks, her voice quieter than before so that it almost gets lost in the eruption of laughter from Lucky’s fan club.
I look at her sideways, take a long drink, then say, “It kinda reminds me of Innsmouth.”
Her eyes go wide and she says, “Oh my god, you’re right.”
I force a smile and a small laugh, and shrug a shoulder. I watch her scan the mirror, presumably watching the people gathered in the booths behind us. I almost ask what she thinks of this town, but something about the introspective look on her face stops me. I’m sure I can already guess.
She shakes her head, so slight I doubt she realizes she does it. She says, “You read Lovecraft?”
Damn. What do I say here? Actually, we were born around the same time. No.
“We spend a lot of time on the road,” I say vaguely with a hope that it’ll be enough in the way of explanation.
“What a dream you are,” she says with a wry little smile that makes my gut twist.
“The Nameless” will be available through Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats August 1, 2023.
Aj Elmore, Author 