The idea for my first novel, gather the weeds, started when I was in high school, and was inside insecure and obsessed with being accepted and fitting in somewhere. On the outside, I tried to show that I was too tough to need anyone. I became more of a loner, lost and adrifted in my fantasy world of writing a best seller, getting published, and getting a girlfriend. I attempted to start this book when I was about eighteen years old, but like my old used Dodge, it started in spurts and died each time I tried to keep it going.  It was not until my sophomore year in Galluadet University that I kept going.

     I sat in my dorm room, depressed and lonely, and I felt like I was in the middle of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland poem. (I learned these surreal concepts and conflicts in life and death from Georgetown University where we discussed this poem in earnest depth.) When I sat down to write in my Meads composition book, I remembered all these stupid fire alarms at the old freshman dorm, how the blue lights burned into your sleep, until you woke, mostly outraged that your parents are spending this much money only to have their child be suddenly homeless in the middle of the night, never minding the mid-terms tomorrow. Trying to find all the right words and feeling all the wrong things, I started gather the weeds, originally titled The Waiting Place. Ten years later, I finished it.

     It took me so long because at the time I was busy trying to figure out what I wanna/gotta be when I actually grow up. Now I will move on to book two, Let Heads Turn As She Goes By... I will install the fourth draft of each chapter on a fortweekly basis. (I will try to do it weekly on Saturday for now but might need more time for later chapters.) I also will be tinkering with previous posted chapters to make them read better.

     Click on the word 'Chapter' and the desired roman numeral in faded gray in the tab on the upper left side of this screen for each chapter. It will take you to a blank page which will show only the word chapter and the roman numeral in black. The chapters are in pdf format. Just double click on the word chapter and the roman numeral and it should show a pdf formatted chapter.    

     Here is some more information about my first book and where to get it:

gather the weeds, Patrick Kilgallon's first novel, is a science fiction horror about bio-ethic, the progress of genetic science, euthanasia expansion projects, and rights of various characters with disabilities that are slowly being taken as the federal government turned then into wards under the state government's control.

The stream of consciousness novel follows and breaks traditions with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's 1984. The story explores one of the military industrial complexes called "The Gate" through the eyes of a Deaf character, Michael Poole, who is trying to survive the hostilities of the blockheads and the Watchers while enduring the boredom of daily living inside the Gate compound. He also must struggle with his loyalty to Sam Rueda who harbors a violent nature along with his epilepsy, and listen to Paul Flounder, born with a mysterious demyelinating disease that forces him to remain in a wheelchair, a prisoner of his rational thoughts which contradict with the outside world.

 Click on this book cover to be taken to authorhouse's internet book store: