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It’s that time again…it’s Work in Progress Wednesday!
I know I’ve said this before, but I want to get back into doing these every month. And I can do it!
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But first, the rules!
•Keep your excerpt to 400 words or fewer. (For a while, we were trying 200 words, but it was really too short.) If you post a longer piece, I may trim it.
•Don’t post scenes with anything graphic, because sometimes young people come across this blog. Grown-up language and innuendo are both fine.
•Feel free to link to your author social media account, author website, or blog, but don’t like to work for sale.
•Don’t offer suggestions or criticism to other writers. We’re often sharing work that’s not ready for critique. However, saying something kind will bring you good writing luck!
This excerpt is from my romcom that centers on the making of a made-for-TV Christmas movie. I’ve been fussing so much with these opening chapters! This scene is part of a wardrobe fitting prior to shooting the movie. Our heroine has taken over at the last minute as the lead executive. The leading man regrets taking the role, and he’s only there because there was no way to wiggle out of the contract. Seth is the head of wardrobe, and Alan is the director.
Seth’s assistant brings Luke a navy fair isle sweater. He rolls his eyes but puts it on and then holds out his arms, in the manner of, Are you not entertained?
I turn to Seth. “Do you have anything more Christmas-y?”
Luke looks down at the sweater. “More Christmas-y than this?”
Seth says, “Yeah, I do have another option.” He goes over to the nearest clothing rack and returns carrying a red sweater with a reindeer design.
Luke stares at it in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“This is a very normal sweater for us,” Alan reassures him. Though I don’t know how reassuring it is, coming from a director in a Hawaiian shirt.
Luke sighs and rolls his eyes toward the ceiling.
When he takes off the sweater, his T-shirt rides up as well, baring his taut belly. Good look, indeed. My mouth feels suddenly dry, and I swallow. I have the same stupid reaction to Luke Dalton that everyone else does, and I don’t like it.
Once Luke has the red reindeer sweater on and is standing there glowering, I have to I press my lips together to stifle a laugh. One time Vanessa put her chihuahua, Pita, into a little Christmas elf outfit, and that tiny dog had murder in his eyes. I swear this six-foot-one actor has the exact same expression.
“This is not working,” he growls, which makes it even more hilarious, but I remember my strategy of being sweet. And I shouldn’t laugh at him. The truth is, even though I’m annoyed with him right now, I’m hoping that he’ll realize that this movie doesn’t suck, that it’s nice and it’s something he can be proud of…although that’s never going to happen.
“I’m sorry, but I think it’s perfect,” I say. “This is for the scene at the end, where he loves Christmas again.”
He scoffs. “The man raises reindeer for a living. How does he not like Christmas?”
“Because now it just reminds him of his dead wife?” I remind him. Understanding dawns in his eyes…which makes me feel queasy. How did he not remember this basic plot point?
“I’m sure you’ve read the script,” I said sweetly.
He gives me a look of mock indignation. “Of course.”
He hasn’t read it yet, and he doesn’t care if I know it. And we’re shooting on Monday.
Would you like to share your writing? Go ahead, in a comment below!
You can also just tell us about how your writing is going…or about how life is going! Thanks so much for stopping by, and have a great rest of your week!
Hi Bryn! That was cute! And definitely how it is working with difficult actors. LOL.
Here’s the opening epigraph and first few paragraphs of my gothic horror novel about a sentient house. The title is “Rosewood.”
I am the hunger that lives in deep places.
I am the thing that looks back.
For so long, I have waited. The rooms grow quiet. The garden sleeps. And silence fills my halls.
I dream now of a girl with a cracked heart and shaking hands.
She dreams of me, but doesn’t know it yet.
But she will.
Come, little one. Come home.
The screen cast Emily Marsh’s face in pale blue light, her features slightly overexposed, shadows pooling in the hollows beneath her eyes. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen. The video quality was grainy, shot on a phone in near-darkness, and there was something wrong with the framing. It was too close, as if she’d forgotten how cameras worked, or stopped caring.
She was pretty in the way injured things sometimes are. Fragile. And luminous.
“It’s so beautiful,” Emily whispered, and her voice cracked on the last word. Not from sadness. From wonder. “You don’t understand. None of you understand.”
The video held on her face for three more seconds. Her eyes glistened, wet with tears or something else, and her lips curved into a smile that didn’t match the rest of her expression. Then the screen went black.
username: @emilyinthehouse
217 videos. 43.2K followers.
Last post: fourteen months ago.
Nineteen-year-old Kaylee Holloway had watched the video six times now, standing in the doorway of her sister Brie’s bedroom at 2:47 in the morning. Each time, she told herself she’d stop. Each time, she’d watched Brie watch it again.
Her sister sat cross-legged on the bed, laptop balanced on her knees, face lit by the screen’s glow. She’d pulled her blond hair back in a messy knot, and the blue light carved shadows beneath her cheekbones, her jaw, the soft hollows of her throat.
Brie tapped the trackpad. The video restarted.
‘It’s so beautiful. You don’t understand.’
Kaylee frowned. For just a moment, she could have sworn Emily’s mouth moved differently this time, the lips forming shapes that didn’t quite match the audio, before syncing back up with ‘You don’t understand.’
Kaylee blinked, replaying it in her mind. No. That didn’t make any sense. She was just tired.
“Brie,” she called.
No response.
“Brie.”
Her sister’s head turned slowly, and for just a moment, a single, flickering instant, Kaylee didn’t recognize the face looking back at her. The eyes were too dark. The expression too still.
Looks good.
Fantastic. And I’ve now turned on every light in my home office because I’m creeped out. (in a good way! Really!)
Good scene. FYI, you have an error in the paragraph with he scoffs: should be man instead of main.
I just finished the last chapter in the second section of my suspense book “Hunting Ted Bundy”, a fiction book about a young woman (Karen) who goes missing in Montana two days after Ted Bundy escapes from Colorado. Her sister is determined to locate her, sure that Ted Bundy has taken her. This chapter is where Karen and Debby have just escaped from their captor.
Chapter
Tires skidded. A door opened. Karen’s breaths came out in spurts. Her lungs burned as her freezing bare feet tripped over rocks covered in snow.
It was slow going, but she wasn’t going to give up.
“I can’t go any further,” Debby said.
The whistling started.
Karen looked in that direction. “We have to.”
“I can’t.”
“Come out, come out wherever you are.” Mr. Whistler’s voice mocked.
Karen grabbed Debby’s hand and ran down the hill. Tree branches tore at her arms. Her feet screamed in pain from the cold and the rocks below.
Boots sounded behind them.
She slid in some snow.
Debby helped her up. They ducked behind a tree.
Karen looked around. A thick branch was buried in the snow.
“Don’t,” Debby said. “It’ll only make him madder.”
“Fighting’s the only way out.”
They waited, listening. He came up around a batch of trees, stopping and looking around. They each stood behind a tree. Karen didn’t breathe.
He walked back up the hill.
“Let’s go,” Karen whispered. She took off, the limb still in her hand.
A shot cracked through the trees. Debby jerked.Then crumpled.
“No.” Karen bent down.
“Go,” Debby said. “No matter what, don’t let him take you again.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You have to.”
“No. We’re in this together.” She lifted Debby off the ground. The bullet had hit her in the back.
Another shot. This one hit the tree as they passed.
“Hey! Stop that shooting. People are down here.” A woman’s voice.
Karen didn’t dare look back. Through the trees, the trailer where the party had been held came into sight. She moved faster. Rita stood in the doorway, looking out.
Their eyes met. Another shot split the air.
Good morning, Bryn! Thank you so much for sharing! Putting poor Pita in a sweater-that part made me LOL.
Anyway, here’s my excerpt of the opening of my Historical Paranormal Romance, If You Please.
The morning James died, he’d kissed Rosalind’s cheek and promised to stay close to his father.
She could still see him—thirteen years old, fair hair catching the dawn light, so eager for his first real hunt on the Grand Prince’s estate outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. “Boar, Mama. Maybe even bear!” And she’d laughed, made him swear to be careful, never imagining those would be the last words she’d speak to her son.
Only Henry’s body had come back from those woods. James had simply… vanished. She had put herself on the first ship bound for England after their funerals.
Eighteen months later, the ache hadn’t dulled. If anything, it had sharpened, finding new ways to cut when she least expected it.
Rosalind stared at the half-finished love letter on her desk—someone else’s happy ending, carefully crafted from lies—and wondered if she’d ever stop finding Henry’s secrets.
“Rose.” Nathaniel’s voice cut through the spiral. Her brother stood in the doorway, rain-soaked and holding a scrap of paper like it might explode. “You need to see this.”
She set down her quill, abandoning the letter she’d been writing for a gentleman farmer who wanted to marry a baker’s daughter. For the past year and a half, she’d engineered London’s most successful courtships with carefully crafted love letters. The ton called her “Miss Match” and never knew the widow behind the phantom matchmaker had failed to save her own family.
Other people’s happy endings paid better than grief.
“Another one of Henry’s hidden documents?” She’d been finding them everywhere since returning from Russia—locked drawers, cryptic letters, references to “arrangements” she didn’t understand. Questions without answers.
“A receipt.” Nathaniel crossed the room, his boots leaving wet prints on the worn floorboards. He held out the water-stained paper. “For a puce fan. From a shop near St. Thomas’s.”
Rosalind took it, her hands suddenly unsteady. The ink had faded, but the words were clear enough. One lady’s fan, puce silk. Three pounds, ten shillings. Paid in full.
Her heart hammered against her ribs.
Henry had hated puce. Called it “the color of bruised flesh and bad decisions.”
So why had he purchased one three years ago—here in London?
I’ve never tried this before, but what the heck? This piece is the beginning of a scene a little more than halfway through my WIP, a domestic suspense. The main character, Dawn, has returned to her hated hometown to tend to her now-dead (and also hated) father’s affairs. He was a hoarder, and she’s been trying to clean out his house, but first the house is broken into, and then she is attacked in what appears to be a mugging. She’s now recovering from her injuries and trying to continue dealing with her father’s junk amid growing suspicions that he was involved in something hinky.
Here’s the piece:
Decades of dust cover the bottoms of the closet walls, so thick the original white surface barely shows through. I scrub and scrape at the mess with the edge of the broom. If not for my broken ribs, I’d sit on the floor and scrub them clean with a rag, but if I sit on the floor in my current condition, I doubt I could get back up. So the broom will have to do.
And it does fairly well, brushing away the layers to reveal a white plaster wall crisscrossed with cracks. The house has stood through several major and countless minor earthquakes, anchored only to shifting, silty soil. I doubt there’s a house more than ten years old anywhere in Lange that doesn’t have at least a few cracks in the walls.
I follow the path of the largest crack, jagged and horizontal rather than the usual vertical. It dead-ends at another crack, that one vertical and… straight. Too straight.
Not a crack.
A cut.
I follow it upward and see two more straight cuts. These, together with the large crack, form a roughly two-foot by one-foot rectangle. I turn the broom upside-down and plant the handle on the linoleum floor for balance. I test it with my weight, and it doesn’t slide, so I grip it and ease myself onto my knees. I try to pry one side loose with my fingernails, but the sheetrock is too thick. I push to my feet with the help of my broom-crutch and fetch a flathead screwdriver from the garage and a dining chair from the kitchen.
I sit in the chair and lean down to pry the piece off with the screwdriver. Pain stabs through my side, but I ignore it. A few levers with the screwdriver along one long side, and the piece loosens enough for me to grab. One pull, and it comes away from the wall.
Wedged between the wall joists is a grey metal file box. I ratchet it loose with the screwdriver, and it falls front-first on the floor with a clang. I pick it up, ease myself out of the chair, perch on the edge of my father’s mattress, and examine my find.
Ha! I loved the line where Luke is like, the Christmas sweater isn’t Christmas enough!? 😂 You’ve nailed the grumpy love interest. Do you have a working title for this one? (Or a set title) It sounds like something I’d really enjoy, so I want to make sure I keep an eye out for it.
This is a snippet from I Never Told You in Ellie’s POV:
Willa knocks softly. Lets herself into my room.
She has a bottle of wine, two cups. Some crackers.
She sits on the floor by the bed. “Hungry?”
I’m not.
“Eat anyway.” She pours half a cup and sets it on my nightstand. Then pours one for herself and sets the bottle on the floor.
How can I eat when my heart’s been ripped from my chest?
There’s no energy in my muscles, no strength in my bones.
“Gentry and I dropped the car off for you. So you won’t get charged another day.”
Thank you.
“He can be useful when he wants to be.” She sips on her cup. “I grabbed everything that looked like yours out of the back seat. It’s in the living room.”
The crunch of her cracker fills the silence.
After a few bites, she says, “Ellie. Talk to me.”
I bury my face in my pillow, the hot tears suddenly replenished, the monster I’ve been running from clawing at my lungs.
Willa’s patient.
It’s an hour before I can finally breathe calmly enough to form words. But I tell her everything.
Each admission is like shoveling a piece of me onto the burn pile.
I tell her about the apple pie, and the bats. About the photo on his wall and what he said to me in his kitchen, when it was just the two of us.
About our first kiss… and our last night.
My eyes burn as I relive it again—waking up in the middle of the night, whispering, ‘It’s always been you,’ as I watched his chest rise and fall.
He was mine, for a moment.
He was everything.
Then I rubbed my hand gently across his bare stomach, memorizing the rhythm of his breaths, and he stirred.
And then…
And then.
‘Syl,’ he said, his voice laced with dreams.
My hand paused over a heart that would never beat for me. Ice filled my fingers.
Then my bones.
All the words I’d ached to hear for so, so long curdled into something hollow.
Something false.
Quietly, in the dark, I broke.
Because I’d been a fool to think he’d ever choose me, or that any sweet thing he’d said was genuine.
I think about the girl who stood on the porch of that old farmhouse all those Decembers ago, her heart on her sleeve.
This piece of writing is great! It really makes me interested!