I really don't remember how exactly I got to this point, but I'm here, so I might as well just deal with it.
"We should really head back now. It's getting too dark."
"No, let's stay. I'm sure the sun will come up every second now."
"Are you serious? It's..."
She couldn't read her watch. It displayed just symbols, like mine. They must have broken when we crashed onto that sidewalk. We're unstuck in time now.
"Isn't it late at night? The sun's not gonna come up for another few hours."
"No, it'll come up. You'll see."
We waited for...
Absent. That's what mom has been for the past three years since the day the front door slammed shut on her and the four carrier bags of belongings. That's all she took, her makeup and her best pair of shoes. Crocodile skin. Horrid looking things but they seemed to mean more to her than the family.
Kathleen, the youngest still kept an eye on the front path most evenings just in case mom returned. Rest of us knew that very unlikely as her latest boyfriend had been very rich and mom had always been a gold digger.
We lived with...
The jigsaw box cover was a bit different to normal so Megan decided it could be worth doing. Especially with the caption 'THIS BOX WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE' she wondered what this could mean, no doubt some kind of advertising ploy.
10,000 pieces. It was a hard slog but after her boyfriend ditched her a couple of weeks ago and none of her female friends were interested after she had ignored them when Rob was on the scene, she didn't have much else she fancied doing. Even Facebook seemed too much hassle.
Whilst she was searching and fitting pieces she...
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty.
Truth be told, until a year ago, she'd never thought of herself as all. The concept of self was one that she'd been struggling with for the past twelve months, and she was finally starting to get a grip on it.
The first step had been coming up with a name for herself. Her entire life, she'd been referred to as "that lot", or, at best, "the taller group". She'd been part of a team...a slightly taller team than the other teams, true, but a minor difference in height does not...
Back in his days, John was the sharpest lawyer in town. At the office we used to call him the "Samurai". He used to step into a court room, with a sword for a tongue, he would win over the jury, and he'd win the case, before you even noticed that it started.
So when he took on the case of the murdered child as the defence, the media was all over him. I remember him cancelling a meeting, because there were so many camera teams around him, that he could not move his car. When I asked him why...
He was dressed in green. It made him stand out from all the other people at the beach in their reds and blues, their dark shorts and white vests.
He hadn't intended it as a fashion statement, the green shorts had just been the last ones in the store.
He looked around at the tan, well-sculptured bodies of everyone else on the beach and felt very out of place.
He was not a fan of the outdoors, he had never really even tried it but outside was varying and unpredictable and he just knew by instinct that he wouldn't like...
This is the draft of my next novel
This is the scene/event that my subconscious created for me that caught my imagination, and made me believe it could be spun out into a whole book, because it was so good. SO good!
This is the ending I thought my agent/publisher would probably want me to finish it with. I don't actually like it that much.
This is something that happened in my actual life that is funny/poignant/unbelievable but I think will add gravitas and depth to the book.
This is the point when i start grasping at formula to pad...
Some days you feel every second of your age. Becca looked at the balloons in her hand and back towards the building. Seven years hard labor, or so it felt, and she was still working in the same department in the same job for the same company.
A breeze lifted her hair and tugged at the balloons. They struggled against her grip, the ribbons seesawing in her hand as if each wished for freedom.
"What are you doing, Becca?" The voice reached out to her but the woman stared up at the floating orbs. The sun glowed through them and...
He was lucky when he found that nickel in the bushes, that'll show up again later. But it wasn't luck that brought him there. See, Marvin got mixed up with some bad people, and right now he is hiding in the bushes behind a gas station, on the run from the police for a robbery job gone wrong. "I have to get to Melinda," he plotted. "I need an Alibi." Luckily for him, she lived only a few blocks away, so he snuck through the alleys, always watching out for cops, but he wasn't lucky enough to find her at...
The audience stared open mouthed at me. "Let's just do a thought experiment," I breezed into the debate, "and imagine that super powered people, Supers, actually exist. Telepathy, Telekinesis. Even flight. All that stuff. Imagine it was not just the subject of your lexically challenged, so called literature…"
This last bit was 'performed' as my fingers nimbly retrieved the hidden comic from a front row student's folder. The kid smiled sheepishly and impersonated a beetroot.
A voice from somewhere at the back answered him. "Then we should look in the asylums, Prof X…"
Prof X? The Mutant? That was a...