777 Writing Challenge

The ever-delightful Deborah O’Carroll has tagged me for the 777 Writing Challenge. (Shout out to you, Deb, for giving me my first tag!) I’m supposed to go to the seventh page of my current work-in-progress, seven lines down, and then post the following seven lines. I’m interpreting ‘lines’ as sentences.

My WIP happens to be Book One of that secret project hinted at on my Writings page, but this tag was too fun to pass up, so I’ll divulge a snippet anyway.

Ever since I saw this tag floating around the blogosphere, I wondered what sort of epic scrap of story I might land on.

And what I landed on was not at all a good representation of my novel. Nothing’s wrong with the snippet at all; it’s just somewhat ambiguous, taken out of its context the way it is. It features my female protagonist, Aileen, and one of her closest friends. That friendship plays only a small part in the grand scheme of things—like I said, not the best representation of the story.

Couldn’t I have landed on something a little more enticing? Ah, well, enticing or not, here it is:

 

Brenna tossed her thick, blonde hair over her shoulder. “Anyway. Do continue.”

“He just asked me the names of my parents and both sets of grandparents.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, then he said that we seemed to care a lot about human trafficking.” Aileen rested her head on the back of the seat. “No mention of dragons though.” It was true—he’d never talked about the shapes that had appeared.

 

(Yes, that was nine sentences, not seven. It worked better that way.)

There’s a twist on the rules that allows one to go the seventh chapter, seven pages in, seven lines down, etc. So I tried that. The result is more interesting, but a tad spoilery. Kind of. Well, okay, it involves things that will probably be revealed on the back cover one day, so I guess I’m just being paranoid. I can cheat and post two snippets, right?

A short introduction: main characters Josiah and Aileen have just been called hatchlings by their trainer, who happens to be a dragon. Josiah and Aileen also happen to be dragons at this point, but that involves the spoilery thing I mentioned so . . . that’s all I’ll say for now.

 

Josiah stood and swung his tail gingerly. It didn’t feel broken, just bruised.

“That’s not what you are, though.” Dauntless inhaled deeply. “I only used that term to motivate you to prove me wrong. It’s like calling you infants, understand? Now it looks as if I’ll have to find a new term, one that’s actually lower than the age your behavior suggests!”

 

There you have it! I did break a couple rules along the way, but this way you get two glimpses into my secret project. Together they provide a slightly better feel for the book than the first one did on its own.

Now would be the time I tag seven more bloggers, but let’s make it a free-for-all this time, shall we? To all you wanderers: feel free to grab this tag and run with it! And if you do, be sure to let me know in the comments. I’d love to see what sort of snippets you might land on.