Saturday, June 29, 2013

Weekend Writing Warriors 6/30/13

Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.

While some of the plot is subject to change (draft two is a pretty early draft, after all) the basic elements will stay, as will the character "voices." So these excerpts will still give you a good idea of how the plot plays out and what the characters are like. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California.

All the previous excerpts are collected here.

I’m now referring to Razor as Neal, which is his given name. Sandy and Neal enter the mansion through a rear door, which leads them into a kitchen easily twice as big as any Neal has ever seen. 
Sandy got a glass from a cupboard, poured water from the sink, and drank it down. “Do you want some?”

“Got anything else?”

“Yeah. Come on.”

Sandy’s sneakers didn’t make any sound on the thick rug in the hall. They passed a living room on the right and on the left, a huge hall opened to the ceiling two floors up. In the middle of the hall, a pair of stairways curved upward to a balcony, with a gigantic sparkly crystal light hanging over the stairs . . . on a couple of the walls, fancy-framed paintings with little lights on above them showed Asian people in flowing robes . . . another wall had long strips of paper covered in Japanese or Chinese writing . . . two fountains set into the wall on both sides of the wide front door gurgled softly.

Neal’s mouth fell open. Where the fuck am I!
Tag along at Weekend Writing Warriors as we blog hop all over the world, reading fabulous snippets from works in progress, works just published and some just about to be. It's interesting to read comments and see who had the same impression as you and who read the snippet a different way. Personally, I not only love the kind things people say about my own story, but the sentence limit forces me to think about what needs to be said and what doesn't. That's very valuable for a writer.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Comments gratefully accepted :-D

7 comments:

  1. Loved the description, I could really see the house, and I thought Neal's reaction was very much in character. Terrific snippet!

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    1. Aw thanks so much! I really appreciate that, Veronica.

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  2. I felt myself inside the amazing Asian living space, enthralled with the double staircase leading up to a balcony. A nice touch with sneakers on the thick carpet... lots of tactile words create a nice picture - thanks! I look forward to reading what happens next :)

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  3. An impressive place indeed.

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  4. Neal must have thought he hit the jackpot! I can picture the house in my mind. Great descriptive passage.

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  5. Nice scene. You couldn't have painted it clearer with a brush! I like the description opener about Sandy's sneakers not making a sound... Plush, plush. :-) It's so smooth, so cool, and then the jolt, "Where the fuck am I?" Perfect! :-)

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  6. Nice change of place. I feel just like Neal, I wonder how he got there.

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