Peeking around the corner of a tree, I shriek. The barrel of a gun butts against my nose, and I rise. Game over.
Okay, maybe I'm being over dramatic. You know how sometimes you just trying to lay low? I haven't been back in ol' bloggerville for very long, but I don't think I can hide anymore--too many awesome blogging friends out there. (Hello awesome blogging friends!) My wonderful buddy Kerri Cuevas, the instigator of the Choose Your Own Adventure bloghop, tagged me in a new writing challenge.
"Looking at you."
The rules: Find how many times the word "look" appears in your manuscript or work-in-progress. Then post your favorite three paragraphs with the word "look" in it. Tag 5 other writers and let them know they were tagged.
This is hard. I'm between projects right now and keep bouncing back and forth, but because it's the one I'm exchanging first chapters on, let's go with Black Vein. The rough blurb:
Seventeen year
old Ivy has been with the Sova family since the tragic night both her foster parents were murdered, but she's not a
servant like most humans in Black Vein society. As a favored child, she
can’t imagine anything more wonderful than her betrothal to one of them and
becoming a permanent member of her immortal family—until Hunter the hunter
shows up.
For the first
time she questions what it truly means to be human, the aspect of herself she's grown up despising, and is she willing to give up her humanity for an
eternal existence of nighttime? More importantly, is she
willing to sacrifice her family, all she has ever known and loved for the
freedom to be flawed?
So far I'm at 23,000 words and there are 72 "forms" of look in my manuscript--however, only 19 "look"s. Some trimming to be done? Yup.
Blurb 1: Did I look like one of them? What did he see
when he looked at me? The nearly eighteen-year-old who lived under a veil of
deceit and expected promise, or an average misled teenager, in the wrong place
at the wrong time?
Blurb 2: “Hm.” He closed the file, a suspect
look sweeping again over me, obviously assessing if I might have been the cause
of the Demelo’s fate.
Blurb 3: I didn’t want to look at the pictures, to see
the charred-black corpses, perhaps even acquaintances from earlier years. And
what would Officer Drake think if I started babbling madly about Hunter the
hunter, a secret society of blood-thirsty elite, and the war which had been
raging for millennia?
And now for the next round of writers being challenged (this one goes out to recent followers):
Well, that's it for me. How many projects do you have in the cue, and which one do you love most right now?
