New Book June 22nd

New book coming out June 22nd. Me as Andrew Fitzgerald. Pre-order if you will.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lens-andrew-fitzgerald/1141642269?ean=2940186725114

Last snippet of the book here:

He stood up, and looked a little ways off to where the stream was, and reached out his arms. He tried to bend the waves of the water with his hand, watching the waves rustled by the current. He couldn’t seem to get anything to happen the first few times he tried. It was going to be difficult to activate it by command. After a few tries, he considered what was going wrong. He was trying to channel it, but he wasn’t really sure how to do it. He had tried sending it from his body but that wasn’t really working. He thought he should try it from his head. Maybe it had more to do with his brain. He tried to flick the waves again. It seemed to have made a little difference. He thought he saw some of the waves change direction a little, but he couldn’t really be sure. It needed to be more of an effect to be seen for sure, and to really have the sense he had used telekinesis. 

What else was he doing wrong? When he held his hands out, it didn’t seem to be making a difference which way he moved them. Up or down, more out, or more in. Nothing really changed. Something else with his body, he thought. He closed his eyes. He tried to calm his mind as much as possible. And then he tried to use all the power he could muster to move the waves. He tried to sustain the energy. And after a few seconds, he was convinced it was working. Then he quickly opened his eyes to see if the waves were moving differently. He could see a few moving in a direction quite differentiated from before. He almost had it. It might have even worked. 

He tried a few more times, closing his eyes, and trying the telekinesis. And then opening them and checking what had changed. Once or twice, it didn’t work at all. And a few other times he was pretty sure there was a difference in the waves, and that it had worked. He was happy about that, and he was sure someday soon he would be able to control it, and use it, one hundred percent of the time. He thought he’d better get home, and so he left the club house and trekked home.

When he arrived he entered quietly, and went to his room. He grabbed his journal, and a pencil, and he began to sketch the waves. First the waves before, and the waves after. He sketched some of the ones that hadn’t really seemed to move, and some of the ones that had seemed to move a lot. He had tried to include every little detail from his memory. Even with some of the ones that hadn’t really moved, he was sure he could see a little difference in what he depicted. He hoped he’d drawn them faithfully. When he drew the waves that had changed, the difference was very noticeable. Seeing them on paper, it seemed the difference was slightly even more than he thought at first, and he was happy about this.

He left them in his journal so no one would seem them, but he wanted to post them on the wall, and be proud of his accomplishment. No one would easily know that he hadn’t had a weird experience, but was able to create the phenomena. 

After that, he put the book away, and played some video games. It took his mind off everything, but it kept occurring to him that he might be able to master the ability soon, and then he’d be able to do a lot of cool stuff. He’d be proud of himself then. Lots of games of Call of Duty had gone by, and then his sister, Becky, came in, and asked him a question that seemed to be rather interrogative.

‘Where were you?’

‘I was just out. Out at the clubhouse.’

‘Ahhh. And what were you doing, at the clubhouse?’

‘Nothing much, just watching the sunset. Wanted to check on it, make sure no one had broken in, taken the couch, or anything.’

‘Hmm. And no one had?’

‘No, no one had taken anything.’

‘Well. Alright. Are you okay? A lot of weird stuff happened.’

‘Yea. Yea, no I’m totally alright.’

‘Hmm. Cool. Alright. See ya.’

‘See ya.’

*

The next day Lens went off to school, leaving his mother, sister, and brother behind in the morning. He was usually first to leave, and when he arrived at school, he headed to track practice, which happened before classes began. Lens was an excellent sprinter, and also ran the 800 meters. He thought that be the end of the year, maybe no one in the state would have a quicker time than him. He felt he was huffing and puffing a little this morning, as it was awfully cold outside. All the excitement of the weekend hadn’t taken the energy out of him, but maybe it had a little. You’d think, he pondered, that having magic would give you more stamina, but maybe not automatically. Maybe there was some way to reboot his systems, make everything recharge itself. If he could produce this energy, then it could probably be directed into himself. He’d probably have to focus it on healing himself, and that would be difficult. It’d take work to make that happen for himself. 

He felt not as enthused with the runs this morning, but he figured no one had really noticed at all. Most people seemed to be in a bit of a bad mood. Being honest there wasn’t much worse than being out there at 5 30 am, when it was cold, and you couldn’t feel your hands, and the air was so cold you shivered more often than not. But anything short of lots of rain, or thunderstorms, and they were out there on the tracks.

After, when classes started, he had changed into his normal clothes, which had been in his back-pack. He had jeans and a button down shirt, and his hair was still wet, slicked over a little, from the shower after practice. Everything was the same in regards to class. Though it was painful waiting for your hands to stop throbbing, and from the sense of wind chill to go away, as you tried to hold you pen normally enough for no one to look, and tried to ignore the cold as it leaked away from your body. 

Everything was normal until he got into the hallways and walked through the sea of students. People looked concerned. They’d heard the power was out in some areas in the neighborhood again, and apparently his sister had been talking about strange, paranormal things occurring in the home. He had no idea why anyone would blame him, but just some people sort of were. 

Wistfully, he thought it would be nice to have the power to just make that all go away. To have the part where everyone heard about that, just go away. And for everything to be absolutely normal again. If he could somehow just change a part. If he could get rid of all the bad parts. That’d be the best thing that could happen. Changing reality didn’t seem like an easy thing to do. It sounded like the tallest of orders. I guess it was thing at a time. He had to nail the most basic thing. Controlling the thing. And connected to that, how to use it, how to make it work.

As he stopped off in the bathroom he thought, if only he could make these processes automatic too, if he could just pee without having to hold it, and direct it. If he could just go number two without having to flush anything or wipe anything. Maybe he would have his hand washed automatically as well, not that he had even used them. 

In his next class, he took to trying something with the magic, though somewhat against better advisement. Though he hadn’t had control of the magic yet, the thing was just too interesting not to try. His teacher was just droning on it seemed, and while he was listening, he really wished it would go faster. He tried focusing on reality, and speeding it up. Making time go faster was kind of the same thing as time travelling, so if he could invent that, it’d be something to be proud of. Being the first to invent time travel could make him as famous as Newton, or Einstein. That would be rad. People would definitely think he was the smartest person alive, and that would make life pretty cool. 

As the class dragged on, he had tried a few times. This definitely seemed a harder skill. But he could have sworn a few times he noticed the teacher speaking noticeably faster, though he hadn’t been trying to. Lens had been trying to speed up reality. And maybe it had worked. Maybe things were moving more quickly, if only just for a moment. All the same it was a normal length class, and a full hour later, the bell was finally ringing, and he headed out into the hallway, making way for his locker.  When he got there, he did find his friend Mason, but there was someone waiting, entering a combination a few lockers over that he’d never seen that person opening that locker before. Almost as soon as Lens started to open his locker, the person dropped the lock and headed right towards Lens. The bull was big, thick, and he didn’t look like he wanted to just mess around. There was big snarl on his face as his stood right in front of Lens, with no space between them, and looked down on him. 

‘So what the fuck ya got in your wallet today, Lens? I could use some cigarettes.’

‘Hmm, not a thing. Who are you?’

‘What? Everyone knows who I am. And no one ever doesn’t listen to me. So might as well give up the fight now. Come on, all your money. Now.’

‘I don’t have any cash on me.’

‘Sure you do. And anything else interesting you might have.’

Lens looked up at him, unsure what to do.

‘Alright, that’s it.’ The bully reached down, ripped Lens backpack from him, and started going through the contents. He dropped several books on the floor.

‘Well. We have no dollars. Seems your word was good there. But look, look at all these quarters. Hmm. Jackpot. Like, near jackpot. And there’s some other things in here. Hmm, a Nintendo Switch. Interesting.’

‘No, leave it alone,’ Lens said.

‘Too late,’ the bully said. And he dropped the backpack, just leaving the Switch in his hands. He took that along with all the change that had been in Lens bag.

Lens was so angry, despite his obvious helplessness in the situation. He wished deeply that he could stop this from happening. He wasn’t physically big enough, or strong enough, to fight back. Though given everything that had happened the past couple days, it did occur to him that one day he would be able to fight this bully off with telekinesis. Right now, there wasn’t much he could do, but as the bully started walking off with his stuff, he tried using the telekinesis on the bully. For a second he swore the bully even looked surprised. He even turned around a little, and considered looking at Lens, but in the end, he just kept walking away, with all of Len’s valuables. 

That was rough, and Lens wanted basically just to go home after encountering that level of bullying. After the next period he saw his best friend Mason, and he told him that a bully had robbed him of his Switch and all his money.

‘What,’ Mason asked. ‘He took something that expensive? That’s outrageous.’

He had, Lens said. And he just walked away.’

‘But like, you could nearly go to jail for that. Are you going to report him?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes it’s best just to leave it alone. I mean maybe someone will come after you if you tattle on them.’

‘That’s true, Lens. And he took all your money, too? Did you have anything for lunch?’

‘No, I’m kind of getting hungry.’

‘He took all your money! And it’s well after lunch time, so of course your hungry You haven’t eaten a thing if you hadn’t brought anything. I’d give you something, but I’m all out of things to eat. Hey, how about after school, we swing by McDonald’s? I’ve got my mom’s car.’

‘Sure,’ Lens said.

‘Awesome,’ said Mason. ‘Oh, and it’s on me. You don’t have any money. So I’m gonna pay. You don’t have to worry about paying me back, too.’

‘Alright. Well, if you hadn’t said it, just then, I’d say it, like Awesome, man.’

‘Well precisely. It was awesome, I’m awesome. You don’t have to agree. So, feel better. And we’ll fix that stomach real soon. I’ll see after last period. Okay?’

‘Okay. Cool.’

‘A’ight. Peace.’

‘Peace.’