Feature a sample of your writing!

[J. Dean]

How about putting up a piece of something you're working on (Or something you've completed) to share with the rest of us?

-Keep it brief (Don't do like a whole chapter or something. Keep it to maybe 400 words max).

-Keep it within the bounds of appropriate material for this forum. I don't know whether or not you can cover words with censor strips that can only be seen when you roll over them like you can on other sites, but if you can, do it. And warn us if it's adult!

-Try to draw us in with your snippet!

Here: I'll start. This is from an upcoming short story I'm working on called "Nick"

The deep exhale of breath cut through the silence of the dark room. A row of spherical light fixtures above the rectangular mirror caused the darkness to fade away. Nick was leaning over the sink, his face down, eyes squeezed shut, attempting to push out the thumping migrane in the middle of his head. It had taken a tremendous effort to lift himself off the couch in the still black living room and into the bathroom; right now, he was content enough to prop himself up and not fall over for a few more minutes.
His head rolled upward, eyelids peeled back, looking through strands of blond hair that fell over his face. A brush of the fingers brought back the sight of his square-jawed, stubble-peppered visage: not too disfigured, except that his steel-tinted blue eyes seemed to be sunk deeper into their sockets. That would pass over time.
“You’re quite the devil, buddy.” A low, craggy voice sputtered from his lips.
He let out a deep chuckle-not too deep, though. Brenda was still sleeping in the bedroom, down the hall. She was hard to wake up, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Not after last night, especially. What a night at work.
And after work as well.
Somewhere, in the back of his throbbing head, a pulse of guilt was tapping him in between the rhythmic thump of the migrane. Yes, he had been a bad boy, a very bad boy. Granted, he hadn’t planned on it; it had just happened. And guilt aside, it had been fun-more fun than he could have ever imagined. He shouldn’t have done it. There was no denying that. A part of him regretted it, dreading to look Brenda in the face when he would see her after work tonight.
But that didn’t mean it hadn’t been fun at the time.

[MaMiller]

Oh, I'll play, I'll play! By the way, J. Dean, your snippet was so good I reached for my Excedrin bottle! (That truly was a compliment!!!!)

This piece is from my romantic suspense, VICTORY COVE.

Even with the collar pulled up over her ears, the myriad sounds of the tempest assaulted Megan. In the wind, she heard the ghostly woman crying, the phantom that besieged her at night. Outside of Wakefield’s dark chambers, the cry took on a hollow sound, like a woeful moan meant to lure you towards its source...the yawning black shadows beyond the cliff’s edge.

Megan also heard the anxious murmur of ice and snow, like a thousand voices whispering about her, berating her, cajoling her. Amidst their dissonance, one voice broke through.

“Margaret.”

Megan’s body jerked and the radio fell to the ground. It wasn’t the storm that called her name. She spun around and instinctively crouched, prepared to attack, but she did not have her trusty Glock. She had nothing but her bare hands and a flashlight.

“Margaret.” That chilled voice called again.

Megan whirled and saw his outline. Night swelled into the menacing form of a man. There were no distinct features, only a shadow—a frightening profile that looked as if the storm had taken its vivacity and breathed life into this very monster.
The man spoke in a somber cadence that masked the scream of the gale. “I’ve been looking for you.”

All her preparation for this moment was whisked away by the wind. Even now, Megan felt the tug of that strong coastal current drawing her towards the cliff’s edge with a pull of deadly proportions. Her cry was one of denial, or perhaps madness.

Victory Cove - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7274

[ASparrow]

Dreams are supposedly taboo. I never understood this as they're such an intrinsic part of the human experience. It's like saying breathing is a cliche. Here goes:


"Pools among the reeds flashed like signal mirrors as the bus sped past the marshes. Ahead, the road took flight, slashing into the misty blue foothills of the Maya Mountains. The window batted Frank’s temple through the crumpled bandanna he employed as a pillow. A day into his pilgrimage, jet lag had finally overtaken his double espressos. He rubbed parched eyes, retreated behind their lids. Soon, he sifted into recesses impervious to light, where not even the din of the chicken bus could reach.
He slipped inside a familiar dream space, once nightmarish but now almost cozy, the way a prison cell might become to a lifer. A rickety chair and a wobbly table perched on a concrete slab at the café and guesthouse he knew to be the Scarlet Macaw in San Ignacio. Long shuttered, it existed now only in memory.
Frank’s dream blended a Belizean sunset with a midsummer’s eve in upstate New York. Sultry breezes blew in from jungled hills across a river. Katydids creaked from overhanging branches with finely filigreed leaves. Winged termites as big as dragonflies harried a bare light bulb. The perfume of rubber trees and fresh-cut hay permeated all.
He waited for Liz, or for whatever shards and wisps of her his brain could still conjure. With instincts honed by endless iteration and error, he hovered lightly in dream thrall, emotions subdued, attention unfocussed. How delicate the spell that summoned this recurrent dream and how easily it could crumble, cursing him awake into the hellish void of an empty bed.
She arrived with the tinkle of a spoon in a teacup. As usual, her face eluded him, as if he were viewing her through a camera with a broken auto-focus. This never failed to frustrate him. He had gazed at her dog-eared photos often enough to etch her image indelibly in his waking mind, yet in dreams she always presented as an irresolvable blur.
Her voice, however, came through in pure fidelity, liquid vowels preserved like the toll of an ancient bell. Too bad she spoke only gibberish; a white noise of non sequitur and small talk. This Liz was a pale facsimile of the one he loved, a faded picture in a locket, no more than a keepsake."

[ficbot]

This is from my latest work-in-progress, and the one I hope will be my first big 'release' on Smashwords or wherever when I get myself organized to do this properly All you need to know about this story so far is that the little girl, Cassandra, is a clone. The POV character is this section is her adoptive father, who is raising her as part of a nature/nurture experiment to see if some problems the original girl had can be prevented given their foreknowledge...

--

So, to his surprise, he had come to grow excited about his brother-in-law's imminent arrival. If he was being honest with himself, he had to admit that Martha was a little bit right. Perhaps he had been a little too clinical about this whole thing, going through the motions of applying various sets of stimuli to the child and comparing the results with the data they had on how it had happened last time. And of course, they actually had found some differences, which was as baffling as it was encouraging. What was it, specifically, about Mark One's childhood environment that had caused the dislike of watermelon, for example? What had they unwittingly done differently this time to produce the opposite result? If they could unravel the precise change that had produced this small dissimilarity, perhaps it might open the door to solving other, more troublesome inclinations in Cassandra.

He had spent days pondering the watermelon problem. Obviously, something had happened this time around to make the girl more comfortable, to create a different set of associations around this particular experience. Had the house been a critical few degrees warmer, or colder, on the day Martha had first presented the food to the child? Had there been music, or television? The presence of a favourite toy? Had the watermelon been sliced into more manageable pieces, or alternatively, left in bigger chunks which produced a pleasing tactile sensation? They would probably never know. But he realized that he had been viewing Cassandra's life as a series of checklists. Watermelon, done. Response same, or response different? Response different. Tick it off, then move onto the next food, or toy, or novel, or rock band, or college, all the way through to the end and see what's different. Martha was right, that was not a life, it was an experiment. Adding a little of the chaos theory, as she called it, ought to spice things up. It would just be his job to make sure they were not so spiced up as to compromise the integrity of the project.

[llreader]

"I could hear the Grey Brothers calling to their Queen in the distance, perhaps calling her back from her hiding place, perhaps mourning the emptiness of this long journey through shadow; I think because she was the only one who understood them. They were orphans in the darkness like us, banded together in the forests, unbowed, unfettered, and unmourned, except by their Mistress, Queen of Madness and the Dark, Empress of Tides, with her cold light that bears no life, but bathes the Earth in dreams, stuttered epiphanies, turns the forest into a land of spirits. Her light is the distant glimmer in the eyes of the Grey Brothers, for they think and speak in tones of moonlight, and their teeth shine with her silver brilliance."

[Spoon Man]

I'll give this a go, its something I started on a whim and I think I'm going to publish it if I can ever finish it:
Warning: Some mildly adult content, not suitable for small children.

Anna woke up on the roof of her car, her arm itching where a mosquito had found some of her needle scars. What happened, she wondered. Then things started to come back, and she realized that she was wearing no pants.

Anna rolled over off the car and stood on wobbly legs over the sleeping form of the guy who had invited her to the party, and brought the weed. She didn’t know him at all; they had just met at a book store where he was staring at her with his green eyes. He had long black hair, and wore tight women’s jeans.

She started looking around; they were parked on a dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by trees. There were empty beer cans and bottles all over the ground, and the smell of smoldering trash permeated the air and burned her nose.

There was no sign of her pants in or around her car, but the guy sleeping next to her car was about her size, a 7. She didn’t relish the thought of wearing his pants, but couldn’t drive back into town naked either. She thought back to last night, remembered how she was treated, how he had sex with her. When he was done his friend grabbed her by the hair and shoved himself on to her, she couldn’t resist. She didn’t want him to, but she knew that she deserved it, that she was too much of a whore to say no. She went limp, taking it and moaning weakly while each of them, the number too gloriously obscured by drugs to count, pushed themselves into her until she couldn’t feel anything but a dull ache and burn as they used her.

Anna felt her face flush with hot blood as she pushed the thoughts away, no longer feeling bad about stealing his pants. He got what he wanted from her, and she felt no remorse at the thought of leaving him without his pants and wallet in the woods as she drove away.

[Shayne Parkinson]

This is from my work-in-progress. It's 1915, and in a precursor to the conscription that would come into law the next year, all men have been required to fill in a form regarding their willingness to volunteer for the War. We're seeing this section through the eyes of eight-year-old Daisy.

---
Daisy woke to the sound of her own voice, what had been a scream within her nightmare muffled to a feeble whimper in the waking world. Her arms were pinned against her sides by the sheet that she had tossed and turned into a crumpled muddle. She untangled herself from the clinging sheet, flung back the covers and lay trembling, the film of sweat across her upper body gradually cooling to clamminess while her breathing slowed.

She remembered the dream vividly. She and her mother had been clutching at her father’s arms, only to be pushed to the ground by a mob of soldiers who had dragged him away while Daisy screamed helplessly. These soldiers were not like the uniformed men she had seen in Auckland, laughing and smiling as they wandered along Queen Street. They were huge, menacing creatures who loomed over Daisy’s father, himself the tallest man she knew, grinning malevolently. Behind them was another figure in the old-fashioned uniform she had seen on the statue in Albert Park; a man she recognised although she had never seen him. It was Eddie’s father, her Uncle Ben. But the face that should have been an older version of Eddie’s was instead a grinning skull, yellowing bone with strips of rotting flesh clinging to it, looking more like the dead sheep Daisy had once encountered in a back paddock than anything she had ever seen on a human body.

Try as she might to think of something cheerful, to picture the new calves chasing each other around the paddocks, or herself riding Star at Eddie’s side, the image of those men dragging her father away kept returning. She knew that if she let herself fall asleep, the nightmare would take hold of her again.

She got out of bed and padded through the silent house. The door-handle of her parents’ bedroom was cold under her hand as she turned it and pushed the door open.

A sliver of moonlight came in through the gap where the curtains did not quite meet. By its light Daisy saw a mound in the bed; two bodies pressed together in sleep. The nearer part of the mound moved, pushed itself up against the pillows and turned into Daisy’s mother.

‘Daisy? What’s wrong?’ She sounded wide-awake despite having been asleep moments before. ‘Don’t you feel well?’ The rest of the mound moved more sluggishly, and a grunting noise that might have been a question came from that direction.

Daisy came right into the room and stood beside the bed. She opened her mouth to explain, but all that came out were great, heaving sobs. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and the words she tried to force out were swallowed in gulps of breath.

Her mother reached out and pulled Daisy over to sit on the bed, her arm firmly around her. ‘Where does it hurt? Have you got a tummy ache?’

Daisy shook her head. ‘They were t-taking P-Papa away,’ she choked out between sobs. ‘Soldiers c-came and took him away.’ Talking about it made the horrible pictures from her dream come creeping back.

‘Shh, shh,’ her mother soothed, holding Daisy close. ‘It was just a bad dream. Come on, come in with us for a bit,’ she said, folding back the covers. ‘Just till you feel sleepy.’

‘Hang on,’ said her father. ‘I’ll just get sorted out…’ He moved under the covers. Daisy guessed that he was straightening his nightshirt; her nightdress often rode up if she was restless in the night, so she was not surprised that the same thing might happen to her father.

Daisy lay between them, so that she could feel the closeness of both her parents. ‘Are you still worrying about that silly form?’ her father asked.

‘Yes,’ Daisy admitted. ‘In the dream they were going to make you go and fight in the war.’

‘Well, they’re not going to,’ her father said. ‘I’ve got too much work to do here.’

‘If they need to start making men go, there’s plenty of them without wives and families just doing things in shops and offices,’ said her mother. ‘They’ve no need to be taking married men.’

Her father made no reply. He was so quiet that Daisy wondered for a moment if he was a little bit grumpy over being disturbed, though she was not sure she had ever known her father to be grumpy. She listened harder, and decided he was only asleep.

Daisy lay very still, a warm body either side of her, her father such a solid presence that she could not imagine anyone dragging him away. Her mother talked quietly for a little longer, and Daisy answered her until speaking became too much of an effort.

---
Daisy's parents' confidence that married men would not be called up may prove to be misplaced.

Edited to add: oops, this is longer than everyone else's. Let me know if it's too long, and I'll shorten or delete it.

[Scott Nicholson]

CHAPTER ONE from The Skull Ring by Scott Nicholson:


I locked the door.
Julia’s sweating palm gripped the doorknob, the click of the tumblers still echoing inside her skull. Would he be inside, waiting, his lungs holding a hateful breath? The years fell away, and for a moment, she was a child again. A scared little helpless—
No.
That was Memphis, this was Elkwood. This was the new and improved Julia Stone, the one who was on the path to healing. Imaginary creeps no longer stalked the alleys of her mind. Thanks to Dr. Forrest.
She glanced behind her at the woods, which seemed to have crept closer to the house since yesterday. The Appalachian Mountain shadows reached out like fingers, and she searched there for movement, any sign that people were watching. That he was watching.
Julia let the door swing open and squinted into the dark throat of the house. Nobody home. Nothing to fear, just the bland patterns of her furniture to welcome her. Just another day in her new normal life.
Nonetheless, her hand went into her purse and touched the cool canister of mace. She went inside, not letting herself look back. When you were cured, you didn't care what was behind you. Forward was all that mattered. Coat rack, recliner, sofa, television. Forward, another step, even though something was wrong with the coffee table.
At first she thought they were small boxes of food, maybe delicate chocolates or caviar, arranged in a line across the table. Something Mitchell would buy her to make up for a slight. But how did the packages get inside?
Her legs carried her closer, her fist clenched around the mace. The row of squares weren't boxes. She touched them in the dimness, let her fingers track over the raised surfaces. A child’s wooden blocks.
She picked up the nearest one, her breath catching. Tilted toward the window, the embossed letter caught enough light to show its cruel hook, its sharp teeth.
J.
She placed the block back on the table, casting a look down the shadowed hall. Nothing there but dark and darker.
Her hand trembled as she picked up the next block in line. She lifted it six inches before she dropped it, and the wood clacked against the table’s surface and tumbled under the couch like an oversized dice.
She didn't need to read the letter to know what it said. Because the next block was the same, and so was the next.
O.
She slapped the blocks off the table and knelt on the carpet, her heart playing her ribs like a mad xylophonist, the melody broken, the rhythm spastic, the blows landing much too hard.
A noise behind her, louder than her heartbeat. Nothing, she knew. She would be strong, because this was Elkwood, North Carolina, and bad things couldn't follow her here. She wouldn't look, because cured people didn't jump at every imagined sound.
Kurr-chack chack.
Nothing but the wind pushing branches against the house.
Chack.
Only in her head. She couldn't help it. She turned.
The creep stood on the porch, six-foot two.
Metal glinted in his fist.
The fish-eye lens of panic both distorted and magnified her vision. Julia tried to scream but had no breath, she rose, glanced frantically for the canister of mace she had dropped, knowing it was too late, it had always been too late, they’d had her since she was four.
The creep's hulk blocked the doorway, a belt loaded with weapons circling his waist. His eyes were hot and steely, his mouth open in passionate rage.
He had long, long fingers.
The blade flashed, quivered.
Her heart had been set afire and shot from a catapult.
The past had reached her, despite all her running and hiding and pretending. It was here, now, come to towering, fire-breathing life. She would never make it to the bedroom door in time. If she fled, his pleasure would only intensify, and her legs were like stacks of wooden blocks shot through with string.
Why fight any longer?
The Creep was silhouetted against a backdrop of sun and light blue sky, the wild colors of autumn wreathing his head like a halo.

[HistoryWes]

This is from my current work in progress: Tesla's Stepdaughters. In a world where men are all but extinct, Agent John Andrews has been assigned to protect the world's most famous rock band, The Ladybugs, and find out who is trying to kill them.

The vendor handed her the hotdogs already loaded with beans and avocado. Stepping to the end of the cart, she scooped on the jalapenos and then squirted on squiggly lines of red and white. Handing one of the dogs to Andrews, she watched as he took a tentative bite. She then opened her mouth wide and shoved in about a third of hers.

“Good huh?” she asked, her mouth full.

He nodded and then took another bite. Ep!phanee began strolling down the sidewalk and even though she was moving slowly Andrews had to take a few quick steps to keep up. He was still eating his hotdog, being careful not to spill the condiments on his jacket. She dropped the little paper hotdog caddie in a trashcan beside the street and he saw that she had finished hers.

“I should get you back to the hotel.”

“I’m staying in this hotel now.”

Andrews looked skyward to find that they were in front of the Palmer House. When he looked back down, Ep!phanee was already going through the revolving door. He stuffed the last bit of hotdog into his mouth and dropped the paper waste in a can beside the door, following her inside. The lobby was huge, with a tiled vaulted ceiling that looked like it belonged in a cathedral. Andrews felt self-conscious even walking on the rugs.

“Why are you staying here now?”

“We have two more days in Chicago. I’ll go crazy if I’m cooped up with the girls the whole time.”

“You have two entire suites at the American. And it’s under complete police protection.”

“I’ve got my own suite here.” She twirled around a few times but kept on course for the elevator. “It’s the same one Ulysses S. Grant stayed in. He used to be on money, you know.”

She skipped into the elevator and he followed. An attendant, a small woman in a tight red uniform, was waiting inside.

“Twenty fifth floor,” said Ep!phanee.

The attendant nodded, and then turned the lever sending the car gliding swiftly upwards.

“Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885,” said Andrews. “There weren’t any twenty five story buildings in Chicago then.”

“I think I feel his presence though.”

“Uh-huh.”

When the elevator came to a stop the door opened and Ep!phanee skipped to a door at the end of the corridor. She produced a key, but said, “Maybe you should go inside first and make sure it’s safe.”

[Spoon Man]

By the way, I'm specifically interested in some females to give me feedback on what I'm writing, if anyone is interested in getting everything I've got now (its not too much currently) and giving me feedback please send me a PM.

Thanks,
Spoon Man