Weekend Writing Warriors 7/07/13

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. Set-up: Sandy has brought Neal back to the mansion the band shares. The rest of the band is not home. Sandy falls asleep and Neal roams through the rooms. He finds a room full of musical instruments. He wanders around the room, reflecting on the last several hours.

This section has been significantly condensed to fit the 8 sentence limit.

Neal dropped onto the piano bench. What if I just done somethin’ stupid, what if I can’t make it here? Me, work for a bunch of filthy rich Anglo musicians? I shouldn’a let ’im talk me into it . . . nothin’ to go back to, blood on my hands.

Thoughts went around and around, bouncing off each other until he pressed his hands against his eyes. Getting to his feet, he saw that a small lamp on top of the piano shone onto a bunch of papers; the top sheet was covered in handwriting and something that might have been a title, “New Day”, with Sandy’s name under that.

Neal read it all the way through and came back to the first lines.

Maybe Sandy didn't just say that stuff to get out of the barrio . . . tomorrow Neal would find out.

I cut the lyrics from the excerpt but for those interested, here they are:

Sun comes up over a brand new world

Got to take my dreams, fulfill that promise

Full of hope, the sky unfurled

It makes me want to still be honest

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