I’m taking a few days off the blogs and Twitter to play with the kiddos during the last of spring break. I’ve been letting them sleep in and getting up early to work on my WIP. This afternoon we went to the movies and scarfed buttery popcorn while my daughter shushed my muffled chuckling. And after I draped my sweater over her bare knees and everything! (I could actually see the lights from the movie reflecting off her goosebumps.) What’s up with the freezing movie theaters anyway?
I’ve also been moderately successful at pushing aside the hopes and worries of the publishing side of this business and reacquainting myself with the very thing that started me on this journey. The writing itself. I”m putting in solid work time with a strict finish date to have this one done, critiqued and off to my agent. Here’s a bit of rough-draft from a scene I added into rewrites today.
He pulled out the sunglasses he’d folded and tucked into the neck of his white T-shirt and gently placed them on my face. The pain in my head instantly eased. I could get used to being pampered. Big time.
“I bet my aunt would let you stay with her, but you’re welcome to stay at my house. There’s plenty of room. Free of charge.” He leaned back against the brick, crossed his arms. “I honestly would feel better if you stayed with us. Someone is killing, if you hadn’t noticed.”
I was perfectly safe from this killer. The words turned greasy and black in my mind, filling my mouth with the acrid taste of lies. I looked down at my lap. “I’ll be fine. I’ll lock myself into the room and not come out. The garage should be able to tell me what’s wrong with my car by tomorrow, right?”
“Probably. Could I tempt you with my brother Baldur’s cooking? He’s good. Makes a mean southern barbecue.”
The brothers’ names alone made me feel like I’d walked into some fantasy world where great, scantily-fur-clad warriors carried big swords and yelled battle cries from saddles on massive war horses. When combined with southern food, the obvious mixed heritages of Native American, Irish and Scandinavian, it was like some overloaded, surreal helping of trash can soup. Trash can soup was something my sisters and I made up once when we’d thrown every bit of food left into a pot of boiling water over a campfire. Without spices, it had come out tasting like garbage—or how we’d imagine garbage would taste.
But we’d been eleven and our mother had been missing five days that time.
I clenched my hands together until my knuckles turned white, then forced myself to loosen them before he picked up on it. Vanir didn’t seem to miss much. How he could miss my lies was beyond me.