PHR: Pink Heels and Rusty -- Title Page and Table of Contents

Pink Heels and Rusty

by Joel Matthew Rees,
Amagasaki, Japan, October 2017
Copyright 2017, 2020 Joel Matthew Rees. 

All rights reserved.

Cheryl is new in town, the only daughter of a systems researcher and an IT professional, a competition swimmer from her previous high school, and a hacker -- and owner of a pair of pink stilettos.

Rusty is the son of the owner of the local independent network service, a hardworking network engineer in training, an avid swimmer, and a white-hat hacker.

Their story is a little geekly romance -- a coming-of-age adventure in the modern world.

1. Paperboy
2. UDP Packets
3. Invitation
4. Swimmingly
5. Deeper Water
6. The New School

Author's note (17 August 2020):

This is derived from a pseudo-flash fiction piece I wrote from a writing prompt that Jenny Flake Rabe posted in the LDS Beta Readers group on Facebook (https://joels-random-eikaiwa.blogspot.com/2017/10/pink-heels-and-rusty.html).

I started writing the rest of the story  just before I ran into an open car door on my bicycle, sheering a couple of ribs and shattering my elbow. The accident and the recovery afterwards effectively hid the plot and the world it takes place in from me. (I could read my notes, but I couldn't immerse myself in them deeply enough to continue.)

Truth be told, I'm looking back at my edits, and the edits were going the wrong direction even before the accident. Too much listening to other people, perhaps. It might be interesting to set those up as separate branches of evolution, if I have the time some day.

But other things take priority now, for reasons I don't have time to delineate, but I'm sure can be intuited. I don't know when I might have the spare time, budget, and energy to rebuild the world and the plot and finish it, but I decided to put the chapters I had up in my novels blog anyway.

The first chapter, I'm going to do a clean edit on, since I sort of promised someone I'd give them a first page of something for them to try editing, but everything I write is too non-conventional. The first chapter of this one is at least close to conventional.

If you think this story is interesting, leave me a note. If enough people like it, I'll see if I can shift some things around and resurrect the whole thing, but no promises.