Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Knights of Microfiction and Teaser Tuesday - 3/27/12

It's the last Monday Tuesday of the month, which means it's time for a Knights of Microfiction prompt. This month's was:

In 250 words or less:
Use at least one of the following adjectives: delicate, repulsive, hostile
And at least one of the following nouns: New York City, My 16th Birthday (yes, this would be referring to you), and Kilts
For the words you don't use (unless you use them all), you can just use them as inspiration.

I'm not normally a dystopian writer, but apparently when I think of NYC, I think of the apocalypse. So here's what I came up with:

They said that by the time the survivors came to, New York City had crumbled. The greatest city in the world, and now it was nothing more than piles of rubble and smoldering remains, its population all but wiped out.

There were perhaps three hundred people left in the city, maybe a couple million in the world. There was no way to know for sure since all lines of communication were down. Ari wished she knew whether her family in Ohio was okay.

She’d made friends quickly. Allies, she supposed, since they weren’t likely to be meeting for drinks or chatting about boys any time soon. But they found food and water and shelter together, and they shared everything they had.

Puppet had survived, but she wasn’t sure how long a Goldendoodle puppy would last in this strange new world. He ate their scraps and whined pitifully when she had nothing else to give him. She knew the others were wondering if they’d be better off without him.

They were living a delicate balance now, surviving while trying to maintain their humanity. Something would give soon; she just knew it would. All she could do was try to stay out of the crosshairs when it happened.


Also, it's Teaser Tuesday. I'm still reading the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, but I'm on book 5 instead of book 2 (yeah, it's been that kind of week). So here are the rules and an excerpt from Silver Borne.

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
  • Then hit up Should Be Reading to add your link.
"I woke up lying in the dark and hurting all over, but especially on the back of my head. My ankles were also sore when I tried to move them." --Mercy Thompson


I'm taking this week off from writing so I can focus on editing Rosetta (which will soon not be called that anymore as I finally came up with a new name). I'm hoping to have the rewrite done by March 31 so I can start giving it to the wonderful people who've offered to read it for me, and maybe even stay on track to start querying agents in June (for the record, if I do, it'll be the first time I've ever created a schedule like this and actually stuck to it). So if you start seeing a barrage of either ecstatic or very angry comments on Twitter, don't be alarmed.

6 comments:

  1. Awesome dystopian piece! you say you don't write this stuff normally? Dude, I don't believe you.

    Good luck this week writing away!!!

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    1. Haha, I really don't normally write dystopian... but I do read whole hell of a lot of it, so that might help. Thanks! :-)

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  2. Interesting that NYC = dystopian in your mind! It's a great setting for it. Great piece! Thanks for playing along! :)

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  3. Back again to let you know you were one of the winners for the Knights of MicroFiction! :)

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  4. Congrats on winning Knights of Microfiction. You do dystopia really well, even if you don't do it often :-)

    Good luck getting your editing done.

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