/connection-terminated
“There were twelve people, alive and breathing, on this submarine yesterday. Today, there are ten.”
In Connection Terminated, follow Elijah Smith — an acclaimed Navy recruit — as he and nine others wake aboard a submarine to find their commanding officers murdered. Friendships and alliances are thrown into disarray as the crew continues to be sabatoged at every turn, powerless to stop the killer among them.
As the death toll rises and fear consumes the deck, the survivors must find a way to work together... or the vessel they excitedly boarded just hours earlier may soon become their tomb.
Author's Note
It's hard to pinpoint exactly where the idea for this project came to me from. Most ideas I have for stories (including another novel I'm working at right now) generally hit me fully formed in my mind at a random inconvenient moment, and I believe the same happened with Connection Terminated. I connected Agatha Christie's work to a documentary I had watched some time ago, plotted out a basic character list with names and roles, and had a rough outline in a notebook within that same minute.
The hard part was the two years it took to extract the 'untainted' story that was swimming in my head to something real and imperfect on paper. In my experience, the hardest thing about making something (especially creatively) is slowly realizing that, if it's ever going to get done, it cannot be done faultless. That being said, I'm very happy with how this project turned out.
Connection Terminated was the first (and as of right now, only) traditionally published book I ever put out, and it's very special to me creatively. I wrote it on-and-off over the course of a two years just before graduating high school, and completing it was a major milestone to me as someone who had been heavily into story-telling for years, but never had something complete at this scale to show for it. Holding the finished paperback in my hands for the first time was an unforgettable feeling, and it's pushed me to keep writing since.
If you have even the most remote feeling of wanting to make something, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do it. If it seems daunting and will take time, even better. It's a great feeling to look back at something you created years later and appreciate the person you were when you made it, creatively and otherwise.
No effort is wasted.