Cole came up with the question for out latest round on the blog chain and it is:
Are you querying? Gearing up to go on submission? Writing? Revising? I'd love to hear what's new with you. And if you'd like to share a snippit of your WIP, even better!
Oh, you mean besides watching Mad Men, Friday Night Lights, Burn Notice and... *ahem* - perhaps just once in a while if it happens to be on and I happen to be near the television - an episode or two of Wipeout?
Oh wait, that's right - there is more to summer than watching TV, cursing the endlessly hot and humid weather, and attending weddings.
So what have I been doing writing-wise?
Well, I've been querying. Last year at about this same time I started querying my urban fantasy, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. After getting some revision notes from an agent, I revised. Then I got even more revision notes and I revised again. Suddenly, it was May. Revisions were done, but I wasn't quite ready to jump back into that query pool yet.
However, in the last month something changed - maybe it was Wipeout that inspired - or should I say motivated - me?
Okay, I am not proud of that clip. In fact, watching it fills me with shame and guilty guilty guilty giggles.
So anyway, I am querying. But I have also been writing, because when you are querying you are supposed to start working on something new. And because I have had this idea - for a YA urban fantasy where a girl goes missing and after a year is found again but she has no memory of who she is or what happened to her - rolling around in my head for a long time now, and I needed to finally get it down on paper. Mostly though I have been writing because after a while I get sick of hitting the refresh button my email inbox.
I am tentatively titling my WIP Immortally Wounded. I'm just shy of the 10K mark so it's still pretty early, but here is a little snippet from the little that I have written so far.
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The mom insisted on calling my memory loss amnesia. As if I were a character in a freaking soap opera. She thought I just needed the right trigger to snap me out of it.
It started with a picture quiz. I correctly identified the Gerber baby, but couldn’t place my own baby picture.
It got worse from there.
Ronald McDonald – yes. The clown from my fourth birthday party – no.
I easily named every character from Friends. My own best friend – “Such a nice girl,” the mom told me as if this telling detail might jog my memory – no recognition at all.
In the animal kingdom category I got Kermit the Frog, Lassie, and Dumbo all correct. But Here Kitty Kitty, the rather cumbersome name that I apparently gave my own dear cat at the age of five, didn’t come close to my guess of Snowball.
This game officially ended when I incorrectly identified a woman with iron gray curls and a closed lipped smile as Queen Elizabeth. Turns out that one was my Nana.
I was trying. Can I say that in my defense? The mom is a really nice lady. And she was trying to be really upbeat, chirpy even, but with every wrong answer on the picture quiz she’d deflate just a little bit. She tried to cover it. She’d pat my hand and tell me it was okay. She was always touching me – patting, rubbing, squeezing my hand, arm, or leg. And that’s when she wasn’t hugging me. That was okay too though. She was a good hugger. As soon as her arms wrapped around me there was that sensation like everything was going to be okay. This was the one thing that we had most in common – we both really wanted everything to be okay.
****
And that's it from me. Make sure to check out Shannon's post from yesterday and tomorrow you can find out what Amanda is up to.
