Six Sentence Sunday - 12/25

It is Saturday night and my eyes are full of tears as I throw open the wooden doors to the Sunset Deck at the rear of the steamship. Sunset is a misnomer, because tonight the sun is setting over the forward deck at the opposite end of the ship. The rest of the passengers are gathered there to watch so I’m confident that this is the one place I can go to have a good, undisturbed cry.

I fling myself at the railing and let the tears fall overboard. At dinner Alan had once again been oblivious to my desperate attempts at flirting, and I'm so lost in my anguish over him that I don’t notice the small boy standing next to me until he speaks.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

- excerpt from The Sunset Deck, a short story

 The sentence that begins "At dinner" has me very confused due to the mixture of past and present tense, but I think it's right. I don't have a lot of experience writing in present tense, but I believe this story requires it. If anyone with better grammar experience has an opinion on whether it is correct or not, please let me know!

Read more about Six Sentence Sunday here. To see the rest of my Six Sentence Sunday posts, click here.

Six Sentence Sunday - 12/18

Set up: While playing a game of paintball, the narrator and her friends are confronted by two figures in black armor who shoot them with a strange weapon.

A cold sensation washed over me, like I had jumped into a freezing lake, and things began to move in slow motion. My legs collapsed and then I was on my back, looking at the sky. One of the men stepped in to my narrowing field of vision, raised his face shield and peered at me. Only he wasn't a man at all - he had skin as red as hot coals and pupils so dark that it looked like shiny black beetles were hiding where his eyes should have been. A row of five short horns crossed his forehead and there was a nasty, jagged scar on the bridge of his nose. He smiled at me; it was the last thing I saw before my vision went black.

- excerpt from one of many versions of my untitled "girl gets kidnapped by aliens" novel

Read more about Six Sentence Sunday here. To see the rest of my Six Sentence Sunday posts, click here.

Six Sentence Sunday - 12/11

Set up: Geek Timothy "Oggy" Ogden is excited to meet actor Zac Furie at a sci-fi convention. But his excitement turns to mortification when Zac treats him rudely, writes "Froggy" instead of "Oggy" when signing a head shot, and charges twenty dollars more than listed for the autographed photo - twenty dollars that Oggy tells Zac he doesn't have.

“I’ll just hang on to this until the next ‘Froggy’ comes along, shall I?” Zac said.

Zac's lackey snickered and a few people in line joined in. Oggy’s neck turned red; the color travelled up his face, past his cheeks and stopped at his ears. An announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Dealer’s room closes in five minutes.”

Oggy gritted his teeth. “I don’t have the money. What do you want me to do?”

- excerpt from ZOMG, or Zombies, Oh My God!

Read more about Six Sentence Sunday here. To see the rest of my Six Sentence Sunday posts, click here.

Six Sentence Sunday - 12/04

Speaking of avoiding people…Nan stepped off of the sidewalk and in to the road to let Ruth McAllister pass. The woman had never grasped the fact that sidewalks were supposed to be shared. She walked straight down the middle, her Bichon Frise, Bambi, strapped to her chest in a Baby Bjorn. Nan nodded hello to Ruth and swallowed the giggle that rose whenever she saw Bambi’s head lolling side to side in the carrier. Would it be so wrong to let the poor dog down to get some exercise every now and then? She understood that people could be crazy about their pets, but there was no way she’d ever strap her cat Aggie in to a baby sling - not that Aggie would let her do it, anyway.

- Untitled Snowbird Mystery

Six Sentence Sunday is a blog meme where authors post a six sentence excerpt from one of their works every Sunday. I ran across it on Suzanne Johnson's Peternatura blog and liked the idea. I'm not "officially" participating (i.e. trying to get my link on Six Sentence Sunday's blog) because there are a lot of rules and they confuse me, but I will be posting six sentences every Sunday through at least the end of December. I think it'll be a fun thing to do and will make up for the fact that I won't have much writing stuff to post about, thanks to all the craft projects, travel, and family visits that I will be busy with during the holidays.

Today's excerpt is from a 4000-word cozy mystery short featuring Nan and her husband Charlie. They are snowbirds - retirees from northern states who "fly" south for the winter. In this story, Nan hunts down a thief who has stolen several thousand dollars from a Cow Pie Bingo charity fundraiser.

Reading back over the story to find these six sentences, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was better than I remembered. With a little bit of editing, I think it'll be ready to share with my beta readers. I love the idea of a snowbird detective - the constant moving provides lots of opportunities for new locations and people - and I would love to have Nan star in further stories, assuming I can come up with some good mysteries for her to solve.