This month’s question: What personal traits have you written into your character(s)?
My response isn’t about specific traits but rather the one thing that drives the character(s), and which often says a lot about their traits.
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Weekend Writing Warriors / #WeWriWa / #8sunday
Welcome to the Weekend Writing Warrior blog hop where writers share an 8-10 sentence snippet of their writing, published or unpublished.
My snippet this week comes from the first novella in a series of seven, Shattered Dreams. Drafts for #2 and #3 have been written. The last four plotted out. My plan is to start publishing them by the end of the year. What’s fun is that the characters come in and out of each other’s stories, as they should as one or both of the couples went to school together and all remain in the same community. Oh, and there is a 1969 Volkswagen Beetle that is pulled out of the lake in #1 with a mystery surrounding it.
As a waitress, Shelley is in the diner’s freezer, having propped the door open with a brick. She stumbles, exclaiming out loud, and in the next instant, Mason is there beside her asking if she’s alright. She’s startled, bumping into him, which tips over a bucket of pickles that moves the brick, which seals them in darkness.
SNIPPET:
Shelley heard him moving around. “Where are you?”
“Smile so I can see you.”
Shelley chuckled, unable to help herself. So like Mason to joke when there was a problem.
She heard him moving. “What are you doing?”
“Let’s pretend we’re blind, and we’ll talk with our hands.”
“We are blind. It’s dark, remember? Besides, I can’t see your hands.”
“That’s the point. We can use the braille method.”
Patty is a good friend and we recently spent a weekend together at a write-in she organized. I was finishing the first draft to the second novella in my Laurel Ridge romance novella series. As a result, because she was looking for a guest for her blog, she liked the idea of my talking about the genesis of the series, which includes already having all seven titles and their covers completed.
High school sweethearts, Mason and Shelley, separated abruptly the day after graduation are confronted by their past a decade later. Now that Mason is back in town, he’s determined to learn what happened. Both are stunned as they uncover the truth. Can their shattered dreams ever be repaired, or is it too late?
Available as a pre-order eBook on Amazon! Only 99 cents!
Publishing date: Tuesday, July 12, 2016.
Shattered Dreams, is the first of seven novellas against the backdrop of Laurel Ridge, Georgia, a small southern community. Seven couples, seven situations, and seven conflicts.
Seven stories with seven couples. Each couple with their own story, told against the backdrop of a small southern community of Laurel Ridge, Georgia.
SHATTERED DREAMS – Mason Baylock has returned to his hometown as a newly appointed judge. He’s hoping to reconnect with his high school sweetheart, Shelley Willis, but she’s not interested. To keep him foremost in her mind, he frequents the diner, located across from the courthouse and where Shelley works, on a regular basis. Once a week for the more than the past three months, he’s been asking her out. And, once a week for more than the past three months, she’s been turning him down.
And then one evening, they become locked up in the kitchen’s cooler by accident. That’s when there’s no more escaping–the real conversation begins–and where the heat gets turned on. She can’t deny she isn’t attracted to him, but she’s not about to date someone who shattered her dreams years ago, either. And then, she discovers that there is more to the earth-shattering consequences than even she imagined, which threatens to fracture and splinter life as they know it.
Will both their dreams be shattered forever? Or does enough of a spark remain that they can rekindle the love they once shared?