Harry of Crack

By Kimberly Reece

Harry Noble had big plans for after graduating from university - plans that included his girlfriend, a job, a car that was more metal than rust - but life had other plans for him. Forced to return home to live in the small village of Crack-on-Vyrnwy in Wales, Harry's girlfriend won't return his calls, he can't find a job, and his car is dead.

Adding to his woes are his mother who's decided she's not as old as she's been acting and his sister who's dyed her hair pink and covered his bedroom in Harry Potter posters in his absence. Harry needs to get his life in order and he needs to do it now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kimberly Reece
• Release date: Sep 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465819154

Kimberly Reece

Kimberly Reece started out writing fan fiction for the television show Third Watch. Not finding any other fandom to match the awesomeness that Third Watch created, she gave up fan fiction for original fiction. She is an avid reader of romance novels and loves movies. Whenever she has trouble sleeping, she puts in one of the Harry Potter movies and drops off right away. Don't get her started on the Twilight franchise, we beg you. She currently lives in her hometown of Martinsville, Indiana with her two boys, Mike and Jake, and her two cats, Zoe and Jude. Harry of Crack is her first finished original fiction story. Currently she has over twenty-five works in progress on her hard drive and that number grows every day. Will she ever finish one? Only time will tell.

Book preview

Praise for Harry of Crack:

Why'd you have to give your book such a weird title?

Aunt Sharon

Did I enjoy reading it? Yeah, I kinda did.

Book club reader

I liked it, but why did you have to use so many dirty words in chapter 2? You know better than that.

Mom

I just ignore the dirty words and go on with the story.

Aunt Dean

I didn't notice any dirty words.

Ralph

I like the dirty words.

Everyone else.

Harry of Crack

A NaNoWriMo Novel

by Kimberly Reece

Copyright 2011 Kimberly Reece

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual person living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is completely coincidental.

Harry of Crack: A NaNoWriMo Novel

Copyright 2008 By Kimberly Reece

Second Edition Copyright 2010 By Kimberly Reece

Smashword Edition Copyright 2011 By Kimberly Reece

[e-mail]

All right reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without express written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

The ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, the please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Introduction

Well, here it is. My NaNoWriMo 2008 finished novel. For those who stumbled upon this book out of the blue, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writer's Month and it happens every November. They need to change the title because since its inception in 1999 it has grown to include budding novelists from around the world and if a few bios are to be believed, outer space. It is a challenge to write a 50,000 word story in thirty days.

My first NaNo attempt was in 2004. I don't think I got to 5,000 words. I tried again in 2005 and 2006 then took a break at failure in 2007, but in 2008 I returned with a new attitude and a silly title generator and Harry of Crack was born. The people and the town of Crack are fictitious. Wales and its Cambrian Mountain Range are real, but I've never seen them. I hope to one day though. I'm even trying to learn Welsh as the spit splatters all over my computer screen will attest to. I have been told that Welsh is not actually a form of Klingon, but I'm not sure I believe it.

Anyway, please enjoy this story remembering it was written in 30 days with my internal editor bound and gagged in the dark recesses of my mind.

Chapter 1

Harry blinked awake to the sight of the piercing blue, bespectacled stare of Harry Potter and closed his eyes again. He groaned and rolled over hoping when he opened his eyes again he would be back in his room off campus at the University of Portsmouth. He wanted to still be in school, still have a girlfriend, still be anywhere but Crack-on-Vyrnwy in Wales. He opened his eyes again, but instead of Harry Potter, he saw the ginger Rupert Grint smiling back at him from across the room. He knew better than to turn over the other direction because on the wall directly next to the bed would be a shirtless picture of Daniel sodding Radcliffe pretending he knew the difference between the front of a horse and the back. Why his mother let his sister, Maggie, have a half naked picture of a guy on the wall was beyond him. She wouldn't let him have pictures of half-naked women hidden under his mattress.

He forced himself to swing his legs over the side of the bed and tried to ignore the Potter movie posters plastered to the upward sloping ceiling. He closed his laptop lid, not needing the condemnation of the blinking cursor on top of his hang over. Trying to write after a night at the pub was doomed to failure from the start, but he hadn't been having any better luck sober so he'd tried to give it a go. The blank page and the mocking of the cursor had only made him want to drink more. With the pub closed and no place to buy more alcohol, he passed out to avoid the illustration of failure the blank page made.

Since he'd come home, he hadn't had a single creative thought. There was no news to report from Crack, no human interest stories that needed written that he could submit as freelance. The fiction stories he'd started in his stolen moments at school no longer made any sense to him. He didn't know where they were headed other than to a dead pile. Whenever he tried to write, all he could think of was what a shambles his life had become.

He rubbed his eyes and stumbled over to the small bathroom his mother had put in after Harry went off to school. Harry washed the carpet out of his mouth left over from a night of drinking with his best friend, Reggie, and did his best not to take the Harry Potter towels and chuck them out the window.

Maggie was obsessed with Harry Potter and by extension Daniel Radcliffe. When Harry had moved home after school, he'd insisted on his old room back, but Gwen, his mother, refused to let him take down the pictures because he would be moving away as soon as he either patched things up with his girlfriend or got a job. She'd seemed slightly angry with Harry when she said it making him wonder if she wasn't as eager to have Harry gone as he was to be off. Every surface of the bedroom was covered with the stupid git. That had been a month ago and the only job he'd been offered were the odd ones for Reggie's dad, Nigel, that he'd been doing since he came to Crack at the age of twelve. Some good a university degree had done him. The bastard coating his walls hadn't finished school and he could buy and sell the whole bloody town just by waving his wand about. Lucky bastard.

Harry, you're the man of the family now. Take care of your mother and your sister. I'm sorry, his dad had said as Harry stood next to the hospital bed holding his hand, watching and waiting for the end. At twelve, Harry thought he could handle the task. He'd used the newfound sense of responsibility and purpose to get through the loss of his father. Harry had sucked up all his tears and put his own grief aside to take care of his mother and sister only letting it out when he was alone in his room. He'd started then looking for jobs to do around his neighborhood. A few people had felt sorry for him and let him stack wood and mow their tiny gardens for a small fee. Harry, having tried to give the money directly to his mother and been rebuffed, would hide the money in places he thought his mother would just forget she'd left it and put it with the rest.

His sister was only six at the time and had still been inclined to do as Harry instructed. By the time she was ten, however, Harry had lost all credibility in her eyes. He may have been Harry (he even looked like the description of the character in the book with his straight always messy dark hair, average build, and six foot frame, but blue eyes like the actor), but he couldn't do magic so he could fuck off evidently. Now at sixteen, Maggie was mad because he'd come home and took his room back and he was lower in her eyes than ever before. She was so mad at him, she barely spoke to him and hadn't been upstairs more than a handful of times to see her stupid posters. Harry was quite sure she only came up to make sure he hadn't taken them down.

Gwen had let him think he was the man of the house growing up, but looking back he knew she was just grateful for him watching out for his sister while she tried to keep them above water financially by making souvenirs and custom clothing for Renaissance Fairs. Harry remembered several nights going to bed after kissing his mother's cheek where she sat at the table and finding her in exactly the same spot when he woke up the next morning. Over the years, she'd branched out into carving wooden toys, painting miniatures, and jewelry making and had her crafts in over a dozen small shops in addition to taking them to events.

She and Harry's father had married when Gwen was eighteen and Daniel was twenty-three. A kid in the front seat could result in an accident; an accident in the back seat did result in a kid. His parents never told him he was an accident, but he'd done the math in biology class. His dad had been a carpenter and they'd had a good life in a suburb of London. Harry trailed after him thinking he'd climbed up on a ladder with a hammer and nails and hung the moon. His mother had worked casually as a seamstress whenever she felt like working - usually around Christmas and birthdays for extra money to buy presents. She had been content to keep the house and take care of the kids. It was a dream existence and when Harry's dad died a week after going to the hospital for a headache, they all woke up. Harry divided his life into before and after that point. Nothing was ever the same again.

Gwen had sold their house, using the money to pay off the mortgage and buy a van to take what was left of their life back to the home where she grew up in the tiny village of Crack. Her parents had decided to move into an assisted living community near Cornwall and gave her the small house to start over. They visited occasionally and Harry, Gwen, and Maggie went down for the day after Christmas every year. Gwen was especially grateful when Harry got his driver's license so that she didn't have to quit working for the trip down. They stopped off at his dad's grave on the way back. He'd regarded his dad as a taboo subject for years then after a while he didn't think of him except for the once yearly trips. Occasionally he had questions about his dad, but it was easier than dealing with the hurt and the tears to let the questions go and keep the memories to himself.

Harry had converted the attic into his bedroom right away. He'd cleared out all his grandparents old Christmas decorations and discarded clothes shoving what he wasn't allowed to get rid of into the eaves. He started doing bit jobs around the village to buy boards and nails to close in the parts of his attic room that were too short to stand up in hiding the left-overs and making a closet. He'd put a door at one end on both sides and had to brave spiders and darkness to get things out occasionally, but otherwise it was a good solution.

His sister's room on the ground floor was just slightly bigger than a closet wedged between the bathroom and the kitchen while his mother's room had become a storeroom for all of her crafting supplies with her bed shoved in the corner all the way to the back. His sister had taken over his attic and Gwen had had Nigel install a small shower, toilet, and sink above the bathroom below and framed it in to separate it from the rest of the room after he went away to school. Yet another illustration of his sister getting the better deal in everything. Still Harry got six more years with dad than Maggie did so he felt like they were even mostly. More than once, Harry had dipped into his food budget or walked instead of buy gas to get around just so that he could get his little sister something she needed and didn't want to ask mum for. Maggie got more than Harry did at her age because Harry spoiled her even if he wouldn't admit it to anyone. Harry had been impatient to say the least to finish school so that he could ease the burden on his mother to a greater degree than the little gifts he could manage, but instead he'd come home to add to them and he was beginning to get frustrated.

Gwen made a pretty good living selling Celtic and British historical crafts on eBay and in gift shops around the area. She was over the moon when DSL came to their little corner of Wales cutting her posting time in half. She was one of the first people to join eBay when it crossed the ocean and while she wasn't rich, she had been able to support her children without having to get a job outside the house past taking her turn at the village library one week a month. She'd even used her old computer to catalogue the couple hundred titles in the dilapidated little corner of the post office and did her best to keep the old books from falling apart while adding the new romance and children's paperbacks to the system and keeping track of them after buying herself a new computer. A new digital camera lead to better pictures for her listings and she'd done better than ever while Harry was away at school. She'd bought Harry his battered laptop two years ago. The keys were worn smooth from the amount of time he spent typing at it, but he didn't know how he'd ever survived without it.

Harry walked over to his window and looked out at the kids chasing each other in the grassy common in the center of the village. To the right and across the square people were milling around the front of the town hall/post office/convenience store/library as was typical for a Saturday morning. "Goodmorning, my subjects, I am King Sully the first of Crack. I am charged with the solemn task of telling the history of our