7 Lines from Last House in the Sky

So last week while I was running between medical tests, Tony Noland and Icy Sedgwick both tagged me in the "Lucky 7" game. The game requests you go to either page 7 or 77 of your manuscript, count down 7 lines, then copy the next 7 lines to a post. I wasn't sure about this, both since I was exhausted and it only seemed possible to do well if the passage was unintentionally funny.

But the passage on page 7, 7 lines down, 7 lines long, is actually a pretty good snapshot of one of my characters. So here's a taste of The Last House in the Sky:

     “Randy, put on some trousers. I can hear you being naked. You’re always too naked."

     He reached down and adjusted himself. “I didn’t bring trousers. I brought a distraction.”

     “Then put on your bed sheet.”

     He sat up and checked the cell’s lone cot. It was an oak plank; no sheets, mattress or treat. “No. Give me yours. I didn’t want to come this south anyway; the climate disagrees with me.”

With good luck, you'll be seeing more of Randy soon. They've got to get out of that jail.

Game of 7, and the first look inside The Last House in the Sky

Danielle La Paglia tagged me this weekend for an FB/Bloghop, The Game of 7. The challenge is to post seven lines from an unpublished work of fiction, and most people choose their present Work in Progress. Specifically, you would:

-Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript

-Go to line 7

-Post on your blog or Facebook page the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating

-Tag 7 other authors to do the same

Here’s the seven from The Last House in the Sky. I was bemused how well it cut out.

“I’m always more comfortable in my sexuality when someone else is in there with me. You know, I caught one of the guards feeling me up.”

“While you were unconscious?”

Randy rose to his feet and prowled to the door. He leaned his elbows into the bars, and finding them unyielding, pressed his face to them and tried to peer down the hall. “We men have intuition about things.”

He heard Ninx snirk and return to her cot, before saying, “I wouldn’t know.”

Vineguard called, “Are you thinking about loaning him your clothes?”

“I missed you boys, too. This is going to be a good one.”

 Now, unto my seven writing friends:

-Carrie Clevenger

-Tom Gillespie

-Craig Smith

-Karen Smith (no relation)

-Emma Newman

-Peter Newman (some relation)

-Chandler Klang Smith

One hopes they are not too cool to play along, or to follow my naked man’s intuition.

Teaser Tuesday: The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly blog hop hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. My book for this week is The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, from 2009. You can guess how long it's been waiting on my shelf for me to read it.
 
The collection was edited by Allan Kaster, and this two-sentence excerpt comes from James Alan Gardner's "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story."

"In his mind's eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That's how you're supposed to cheat death if you're carrying a ray-gun:
with cool heroic flair."






Gardner's short is just great, a logical progression from the Spider-Man influences it implicitly and explicitly drops. The anthology contains a lot of award-winning work, but the quality of the humor and humanity is a great start. I'm looking forward to meeting Gardner at EerieCon this weekend.

Everyone is welcome to Teaser Tuesday. The rules are as simple as:
• Grab your current book
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• Avoid spoilers! Don't give too much away or you'll ruin it for the very people you're suggesting it to.
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers