Looking for an archival post for this week, I found an old document in my Google Drive that looks like the start of a novel, though I have no idea where I was going with it (aside from everything that the very on-the-nose foreshadowing in the prologue implies). For me, it’s a fascinating look back at my writing style a few years ago, back when I started a lot of novels and abandoned them after less that 1,000 words (as opposed to now, when I write at least 100,000 words before abandoning them) and was more open to crazy ideas like starting a novel at the inception of the universe.
Prolouge
For most of its life, nothing very important ever happened to fifteen uninhabited square miles out in the middle of Texas. If it has a consciousness, it probably spent its billion-year lifespan complaining about its mind-numbingly boring.
It, like most land on earth, had been created during the formation of the sun. It was molten magma for awhile, then cooled down. Awhile after than, it was part of the ocean. Then, for reasons that were never entirely clear for that little scrap of land, water covered it and there were a lot of fish. A little while later the water drained away, the fish left, and trees and grass started growing.
Native Americans crossed it a couple of times, then some Mexicans, then some white settlers, then a couple of guys got shot there. Those murders were probably the most interesting thing that happened to those fifteen square miles, and even they weren’t all that interesting. Most of the rest of the land, especially the land in Texas, has much more interesting slaughter stories.
Someone built a house, a wacked out writer who tried to retreat from society to become one with nature and become their true, uncorrupted self. It didn’t work out, though, and she left almost immediately.
A highway cut through it, filling the big, hollow Texas nights with the yellowish glow headlights and the sound of tires tearing across pavement, trying to get somewhere more interesting than this bland bit of land.
There was one interesting thing that happened to it, though.
It lasted just one year. Really just a moment, a flash, a microsecond for a piece of land that had already been around for billions of years and had another couple billion to go until the sun exploded. It seemed like it was over as soon as it had begun.
For that year, the only thing people seemed to talk about was that piece of land. Not just people in central Texas, people all over the country, all over the world. Every few days another a news crew came to do a story on the piece of land that no one had ever given a rat’s patoot about. The trees were cut down and houses were built and cars drove about and people flocked from miles around to take pictures on their phones and post them to social media and get into spirited debates in the comments about the nature of freedom and law and nationality and all sorts of other things that the land represented.
And then it was over. The land was scarred and gorged and littered with trash and dea and, ultimately, forgotten. Every once in awhile someone would bring it up casually in conversation, but never more than a passing mention. It got a brief notice in some history books, a footnote of a footnote.
But that didn’t matter. The land got more than it ever could have hoped for, a sudden flurry of attention that all began with a 911 call.
“Hello, this is 911, what’s your emergency?”
“Am I on the phone with the government?”
“Sir, are you or anyone around you in immediate danger?”
“Answer the question, dammit! Am I on the line with someone from the government?”
A deep sigh. “Yes, I am on the government payroll, if you insist. Now, if you please, are you or anyone-”
“Well listen up, government! I’ve got fifteen square miles of undeveloped land out by Interstate 35 and me and it are seceding from this socialist hellhole of a nation. Pass it on.”
“Sir, please, are-”
There was a click as the man on the other end hung up the phone.
Thus, a nation was born.
And fifteen square miles of land got its story to tell.
Chapter 1
Sarah Hartley got home after a long, depressing day answering 911 calls. There had been a woman who had called right after being robbed and attacked. A child who had misdirected two fire engines and an ambulance to a nonexistent fire as a prank, and a man who had just cried into the receiver for awhile, then hung up.
In the midst of it all, she almost forgot about the man who claimed to have seceded.
She was young, just out of college, and already back to living with her parents. At first she’d tried to maintain some level of independence by renting her own apartment. The building burnt to the ground a few weeks before after her roommate had been smoking in bed, however.
It was sort of ironic that, when she called 911, she personally knew the receiver.
Sam was gone for hours and
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