"WORDS ARE, IN MY NOT-SO-HUMBLE OPINION, OUR MOST INEXHAUSTIBLE SOURCE OF MAGIC. CAPABLE OF BOTH INFLICTING INJURY, AND REMEDYING IT." ~ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
Showing posts with label writing sample (just for fun). Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing sample (just for fun). Show all posts

Monday, March 15, 2010

I Cheated

Writing a PG love scene is IMPOSSIBLE.

Seriously. When I think PG, I think Lilo and Stitch. And you KNOW Lilo's not fishing for trouser trout when she's out with Stitch. Why? Because PG sex scenes do. not. exist.

And yet, somehow, Simon was kind of cajoled into hosting this PG Love Scene Blogfest. And then, in turn, he forced me to participate... Yep, he stuck a gun against my ear until I signed up. I should have just told him to go ahead and shoot me.

So, yes, I cheated. My scene is definitely not PG. I couldn't do it. I went with PG-13 instead. I did stick with the rules otherwise though. (kind of)

The rules were:
  • A short love scene between two characters (yes, two, ‘cause if it’s a threesome or better, it sure as hell ain’t PG!)
  • The reader needs to understand that the act of love is occurring, but the language must remain MG/PG.
  • You may not fade to black because that would be cheating. 

Um, so here's my entry:


When his fingers graze my shin, I know it’s starting. I push up onto my elbows and smile at him, so he understands I’m okay with it. It was my idea, after all. My idea for the picnic. My idea for the secluded spot at the foot of the hill. And my idea to mix vodka into a half empty 20-ounce Sprite bottle—just to see what would happen.

As if we didn’t already know.

His hand works its way up past my knee and I find I can’t meet his eyes anymore, so I lay back on the blanket to stare at the sky. A few puffs of grayish white speckle an otherwise pale blue. And far in the distance are darker storm clouds, but they won’t reach us for a while. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough.

I can’t quite figure out what to do with my hands, so for now they go behind my head. He’s scooting closer, at the same slow speed as his hand traveling along my leg. I want to look at him, but my eyes refuse to move in his direction. He reaches my thigh and the pressure is just a little too much. I giggle. I can’t help it—I’m ticklish. He laughs too.

I know he’s looking at me. I can feel his gaze on my face. A moment passes, and then another. I watch a cloud wander by overhead. I feel the change in pressure a second before he starts to pull his hand away, so I catch it with mine and slide it closer to the hemline of my skirt. I leave my hand on top of his, for a second, enjoying the warmth. It seems to match the liquid heat working its way down my stomach.

The wind picks up a bit and the trees begin to sway. I watch the branches dance and wonder if they’re really moving in perfect rhythm or if the vodka’s helped the tango tempo playing in my mind.

And then he’s kissing me and my hand weaves into his hair. His kiss is messy, but not sloppy; relief mingles with regret when his fingers work their way over my skirt instead of under it. But then his hand grazes my hip and rests at my side, his thumb stroking my stomach through my shirt. And next my ribs. He rolls his fingers across each one, like a piano. I wait for the laughter to choke my throat—but it never comes. Why doesn’t this tickle? The thought disappears as soon as it flits through my mind, though, because he begins to trace lazy figure eights around my collarbone. I suddenly can’t remember out how to swallow. When I do, it sounds like someone stepping in mud—so loud—and now mortification mixes with…whatever else this is I feel. Need?

A shift in weight and he’s laying beside me, sliding his hand back down the way it came. When his lips travel to my throat, my eyes open, for a brief moment, in shock at the electricity bouncing across my skin. I notice, distractedly, that the storm clouds are closer now, faster than I thought they’d be. But when his fingers slide under my shirt, when he smoothes his hand along my skin, everything hazes into a bright white and I stop seeing anything at all.

I realize, at some point, that I’m moving. With eyes still closed, it’s almost like floating in the ocean. Waves rolling under my back, lifting my hips and washing over my toes.

And he rides the same current—shares each crest. When the first fat drops of water splash from the sky—we’re too busy floating together to notice.

But after, when I lean my head back against his shoulder, I open my mouth to catch the rain.



PS. To read everyone else's entries, click here.
PPS. Alexandra posted about duets--music for writing--over the weekend, make sure you don't miss it because it's the first in a series =) (click here)


♥ Sara

Monday, December 21, 2009

A Writer's Tribute to Mistletoe

Sherrinda over at A Writer Wannabe came up with this super fun concept for writers who blog. Today, December 21st, is the Official Kissing Day Blogfest!!

In her own words,
I thought to myself, why don't we all post a kissing scene from our current WIP? All on the same day? We can hop around to all our friend's blogs and read about some sigh-producing, high-giddy-factor kisses. Who wouldn't love that? So here we go......
And I've decided to participate! The kissing scenes in Shattered were some of my favorite ones to write. But, I get nervous about posting sections from work that I want to publish. (NOT that I think anyone would steal it or anything! But because what if someday I have an agent who has a no posting policy?) So I wrote something new, just for Kissing Day Blogfest! It ended up surprising me--because I pretty much only write YA these days, but this scene came to me with adults in mind. Fun stuff! 

My Kissing Scene
“I can’t breathe... I forget how to breathe when you look at me the way you do.” She turned her head, unable to meet his eyes.

He stroked the side of her face and dragged a thumb across her lower lip, rough but, somehow, also tender.

“Look at me.”

She couldn’t.

“Look at me.” He lifted her chin so that she would.

“What are we doing? What is this?” Though no more than a whisper, her voice shook.

He held her gaze. “You know what this is.”

For a moment, silence. It pricked her neck and burned her cheeks. And then she felt nothing except for the pressure of his lips against hers.

The stubble on his chin against her neck, as his mouth traveled the line of her jaw.

The rays of warmth that blossomed in the center of her being, as his hands trailed along her spine... His thumbs, when they traced paths down her ribs to rest at to her hips.

The sharp intake of breath in the moment before his lips met hers a second time.

Only when she felt the wall at her back did she realize they’d moved. It blocked whatever path they’d been on, but didn’t matter.

More pressure. More frenzied. Driven with an urgency previously unexpressed. The last remnants of restraint shattered and she pressed herself against him, into him. Needing the connection. Drowning in it. He pressed back. And so the dance began.

Oh, yes. She knew what this was.

Hope you enjoyed :-) Now I'm off to stalk the other kissing excerpts! (Sike! Truthfully, I prescheduled this post, so chances are I'm still sleeping... BUT when I wake up I will so be reading all of the other excerpts!)

I'll leave you a photo of my own personal mistletoe moment... (From my wedding last year!) 


****Okay - I have to add this. You know how I put everything in wordle? Because I'm pretty much addicted to it? Well the kissing scene was no exception. And look how sweet the word cloud from it turned out:

♥ me

Friday, November 20, 2009

Max and Natalia

Below is a piece flash fiction I wrote for Shannon's contest... Shannon posted a wordle word cloud and told contestants to create a short story using words from the cloud.  (How many times can I type the word 'word' in one sentence... and now, make that two...)

I bolded the words (that I could remember) I used to form the story with.  It was fun - a definite change of pace from Shattered - the young adult urban fantasy I spent the past five months writing.

So, here it is... Will I win the prize?  Who cares! I mean, it'd be cool - don't get me wrong... It's just that I think any contest that gives writers a reason to write is a contest worth entering...


Natalia didn’t talk about Avalon.

Max didn't press her about it.

He loved her. With that deep, faerie tale kind of love that’s rarely in the cards for anyone. She was his world. So he didn’t press her.

But she was pulling away. Whatever had happened, whatever secret she kept, it seemed to set a shadow within her open, carefree nature. Max couldn’t erase the nagging suspicion that somehow Ernie Iver was involved. But he was out in California -- nowhere near Minnesota. Thank God.

The man was a goblin, a monster. Next to him, baboons looked like little kids. Natalia said they were just friends. And Max had believed her. Before Iver’s very public, very verbal, and unfortunately very truthful, attack on their relationship.


Those days were long past though. They’d made their way back to a good place. A better place, perfect and built on trust.

Still, something changed when Natalia went to Avalon. She never read books anymore. She didn’t even take the time to brush her hair.

On the second Sunday of every month since Max had known her, Natalia and her father went shopping for antiquities. They’d discovered an ancient looking table once, years ago, in a dusty old town in North Carolina. It was made out of an old barn door. They’d hauled the thing home, sanded it out on the deck, and stained it a dark, chocolate color. Four weeks they spent on the table and Natalia loved it. She guarded it like an army of one - Max wasn’t even allowed to work on his crosswords without a placemat between the magazines and the wood.

Since Avalon, she sat at the table, silent in her chair every morning and stared out of the window. But Max knew she wasn’t really looking at anything. Her mind was elsewhere. She drank glasses of water without coasters, and those glasses left rings on the oak.

So he tiptoed around her. He kept things light, trying to let the darkness run its course.

One month, though, turned into three. He just couldn’t stand the defeated look on her face anymore. So he sat down, and stared at her across the table, until she met his eyes. And he asked her to explain the business in Avalon.

She painted a picture for him with her words. By the time she finished, he’d rubbed his knucklebones raw against her beautiful antique table.

After that, Max didn’t talk about Avalon either.




Have a great weekend!!

♥ me

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Work Sample: Paragraph

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent with Curtis Brown Ltd., is having a contest.  You can read all about it here, but basically it's a contest in which writers post a comment on his blog with an opening paragraph for a story that they're working on.  The contest closes this afternoon.

This contest happened with perfect timing for me!  I've had an idea for a while now about a totally different story than the one I'm working on.  Different genre, different tone, different everything!  And I came up with it because the first line sort of popped itself into my head one day... It was present in the back of my mind for a while, and one night before falling asleep, I thought of the first paragraph.  No more than two weeks later - Nathan's contest starts!

So I typed up what I'd been storing in my head, edited it and entered it in the contest.  I took a night off from Project Jane to work on this, and I'm not going to lie - I had a really fantastic time!  Don't get me wrong - I'm having a blast with PJ, but sometimes a little break will do wonders.  I woke up the next morning with full steam for Jane.

Anyway, here it is - here's the paragraph I entered:


         Spencer Irwin had an unfortunate nose. “You think it’s bad from the front,” he’d once overheard someone say, “but from the side, man, it looks like a God damn ski slope.” Laughter ensued. So rang the tune of Spencer’s life. Snubbed by his peers, ignored at work, spurned by women; Spencer knew, without a doubt, his nose was to blame for his adversities. Truth be told, the ski slope comparison was a mild, almost kind, description. His nose began as a ridge protruding unevenly between his brows. It fell past his eyes in a sharp, 30 degree angle and ended right above his thin, always tightly pressed lips. The skin along its bridge puckered into a crooked, ashen wrinkle; one black coarse hair spouted from the center of its fold. When Spencer crinkled his nose in disdain, a somewhat frequent habit, the hair quivered and twisted; it danced to an awkward, inharmonious rhythm. He plucked the hair every week with expensive, stainless steel tweezers. And every week it grew again, a weed determined to flourish in an otherwise rotted garden.

Will it win?  Doubtful!  There are literally thousands of participants - sure to be some great talent.  But it's still fun nonetheless :)

*To give you an idea of how many people have entered - I posted my paragraph last night around 10:30; I was poster #2,134. And today, as of 1:00 pm, the participant number has risen to 2,394. That's a heck of a lot of participants!! So fun :)




♥ me