WeWriWa 2-03-13

Welcome to my first post for Weekend Writing Warriors! It's a new Sunday blog hop, where you sign up at the WeWriWa site, post up to eight sentences from an original work of yours on your blog, then visit others from the sign-up list. There's a lot to love about a meme like this. You get to read snippets from a wide variety of genres, you get to interact a bit with the authors, and when you put your own sentences together, you really internalize the idea of being succinct.

For a few months I participated in Six Sentence Sunday. Weeks of wrestling with such tiny bits of my work-in-progress in order to say something meaningful but stay within the guidelines taught me something about recognizing the truly unnecessary parts. It's funny how you think you have to link thoughts and movements and dialogue together so precisely, but then when you cut stuff, let it sit for a bit then read it, you realize how much better it flows.

So on to my eight sentences. I'll be using excerpts from draft two of my novel-in-progress, tentatively titled Street Glass. My tagline: Underprivileged Latino 18-yr-old 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.

This snippet comes from Chapter One, several paragraphs from the beginning. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California. I've skipped introducing the main character who goes by the street name of Razor. He's part of a street gang. The setting is a dingy room, the ceiling half open to the sky; two oil drums in the middle of the room used for burning branches and whatnot provide some heat and light. Razor is trying to follow the rule laid down by the gang's leader, Coyote: do not look at Coyote's girlfriend Trist, ever. However, it's hard not to look at somebody who's sauntering around a few feet in front of you. The excerpt is in Razor's point of view. 

He twisted his mouth into a grimace. The last couple of years, the only good thing about being under Coyote’s thumb was being near Trist. If only he could get her away from this rat hole, maybe out to San Diego, she’d see he wasn’t like Coyote. Nah, they’d have to get further away, like deep into Mexico.

Wouldn’t it kick ass if he could track down his relatives there and show up on their doorstep? Hey, this is my shot-caller’s ex. She’s with me now and we need a place to crash, for like maybe two or three years.

As her dark eyes met his, a shiver ran through him.

Hope you'll join me in hopping around to other WeWriWa blogs! Blog hops make me wonder what would have happened if the internet had been around when Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien were writing :D