Good Intentions is my latest work, released on November 17th, 2015. Good Intentions is a character driven story about a man struggling with his conflicting goals of helping a girl in need and landing a big business deal. From the cover:
When his plane touches down in Portland, all Brian Palmer is expecting to do is wink, flash a smile and close another deal. That all changes when he sees Cassie sitting outside the airport, scared, hurt and alone. He approaches her with nothing but good intentions…
That chance encounter triggers a series of events which will repeatedly test Brian’s character, values and morals.
On the brink of closing the biggest deal of his life, Brian is faced with some very difficult choices. How much is he willing to do to help a girl in need? How far is he prepared to go to close a deal? And will he be able to live with his decisions?
Good Intentions is part one of the three part Brian’s Secret story. The initial draft of Brian’s Secret story line was a single work, simply titled, “Consequences”. In that initial draft, Brian’s interaction with Cassie was really skimmed over, being limited to only a few paragraphs. When I was editing the draft, I couldn’t leave it like that. Cassie was a fully developed character and her entire story, including the interactions with Brian, were complete in my mind. It didn’t seem fair to her to deny her a voice in the final work.
The addition of 45,000 words to the “Consequences” manuscript made it much longer than what I was comfortable releasing. While pundits disagree on book length requirements, an unknown author publishing a 135,000 word work in a non Epic Fantasy genre has a huge hill to climb to get anyone to buy it. 70-90k words is what is recommended for new authors, with all major publishers agreeing that anything over 100k is simply too long. While those constraints seem arbitrary to me, I’d like to give my work the best chance possible.
Early reviews of Good Intentions have been very positive. My favorite so far is from Carol Coetzee for Reader’s Favorite, who said, in part:
Good Intentions combines a series of twists and turns in a subtle manner. A young man with good intentions helps out a young girl in a difficult situation. As the tale unfolds, you are taken on an interesting and perplexing journey from the suburbs to the slums. Love, lust, greed, betrayal, desperation, addiction and kindness are just some of the twists you will encounter. A sometimes sad, sometimes scary story plays out between the pages, leaving you breathless and captivated until the last moments of the tale. An engrossing read! Makes you wonder about the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Which I think sums it up nicely. Why not check it out yourself? Good Intentions: Brian’s Secret – Part One
