WIP Wednesday Bryn Donovan

Hey friends! It’s the first Wednesday of the month, which is when I invite you to post a segment of whatever you’re writing. I discourage critical comments and suggestions on other people’s work, because I want people to feel free to post things that are quite rough (the way I do!) This is just for sharing. Encouraging words are always appreciated, though!

Last month I got a draft of my Southern gothic romance novella to my beta readers, and my goal this month is to complete 25K words on book two of my paranormal romance trilogy. Although I haven’t really started yet, I do have a few random scenes of this project scribbled down in notebooks, so I’m sharing one of those!

My heroine, Val, is an empath who can go into other people’s psyches. Her romantic interest here, Tristan, is someone she’s known from childhood, but he has retrograde amnesia as a result of a magical battle.

 

WIP Wednesday

 

We walked a few more steps on the beach and Tristan suddenly stopped, a stricken look on his face. His confusion zigzagged right through me. I tightened my hand around his. “What is it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, I just—”

He fell on his knees on the shore as if someone had knocked him down. The intensity of his distress bored through my skull and my heart jumped into double time. I couldn’t even tell exactly what he was feeling. He was like ten televisions tuned to different channels, all turned up to a deafening roar.

I knelt down in front of him. Waves splashed around our knees. I looked into his eyes and he stared straight ahead, unseeing.

“Tristan!” I shook his shoulders. He made no response. The frequency of his emotion felt as though it might decimate me. It was too strong for anyone to endure for long. I panicked. He is dying.

I forced myself to take care as I ghosted into his psyche. Whatever was the matter with him, a rough invasion might be too hard to take.

In his soulscape, we knelt in the middle of the city street. The sky above him teemed with movement and color and loud voices spoke in a cacophony. My insides wrenched. His psyche was disintegrating again, and not in a way I could imagine how to fix.

He stared up at the sky with wide eyes, his mouth parted. As I looked up, I made out an image of myself, at about the age of six. And then a monster, humanoid, but with rows of tiny shark teeth—something he had killed on a mission.

A naked girl in what looked like a college dorm room. A man yelling about something. His mother as a young woman, reading from a picture book.

His memories. Each of them came with their own emotional responses—fondness, disgust, anger, love. They had all flooded back, and he was experiencing them all at once. It was too much to bear and I wanted to retreat, just for a moment, and escape the painful onslaught.

~

Share whatever you like, or if you just want to chat about how your work’s going lately, that’s great, too. Happy writing!

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