The 7/7/7 Snippet Challenge!

A fellow writing challenge participant shared this cool challenge with me earlier today but I didn’t have a chance to get around to it until just now. (I’ve been playing Hyrule Warriors with my niece for the last three hours).

The challenge is pretty simple:

·      Go to the 7th page of your work-in-progress

·      Scroll down 7 lines

·      Share the next 7 lines of your work-in-progress in a blog post

·      Tag 7 other writers (with blogs) to continue the challenge

Some of the writers tagged in my round of the challenge were unable to participate as their works-in-progress were sequels to their first books and would include major Book One spoilers. This was the case with my work as well, so I decided to jump to another book I recently finished editing that I plan to publish in 2016. It’s called The Fortune Teller’s Daughter.

I love this book. It was the second book I wrote during the Writing Challenge and I learned a lot from (and since) writing it. When I first met the characters in this novel and started to discover their stories, I had no idea how I was ever going to capture it all—it was an enormous tale. And so, I’ve had to tackle it bit by bit. This scene features my protagonist, Cora Solomon, and occurs the moment her life is forever changed.

She bounded up the stairs to her house and stepped inside.

“I’m home!”  She closed the door behind her. “I can’t believe you missed—”

Her sentence died on her lips. Her backpack slid out of her hand and onto the floor.

Chairs were overturned and lie on their sides. Stuffing littered the floor in front of the sofa. Cushions were torn open and tossed aside. All the books on the bookshelf had been ripped out and now lay in a heap next to the television. A fire poker lay abandoned on the tile next to a dark puddle…

Clearly—something very terrible happened to our poor little Cora. That’s a sample sketch I drew of her sometime back at the top of the blog, by the way :). It was super hard to pick which book I ought to use for this challenge. I had another work-in-progress that I started last summer but had to step away from to start editing the four or five books I’d finished. I think this is the book I’m actually going to start writing again in 2016. It was a fun story. I called it The Harvester War. I have no idea where it was going, but it’ll be neat to pick it up again. I’m sharing here just for fun. (I’m not even kidding—I have no idea where I was going with this story, lol).  

Her eyes swirled like clouds of grey. She wore a sword across her front and when she pulled it from its scabbard—he saw that it shone with golden light. He would have recognized it anywhere, though he’d only heard of it in stories. It was sunstone. The strongest metal in the known universe, mined in the City of Ithaca. Very few had successfully shaped it into weapons, which told him that this girl was a Solomon, one of the Guardians of the Seven Portals.

The soldier raised his gun and pointed it at her.

“No!” Brady shouted.

 

Weird, huh? Did she live? Did she get shot? Did Brady dive in front of her? I guess I’ll have to keep writing to find out.

Happy writing everyone!

S.