Sunday, February 1, 2015

#NovelSnip

#NovelSnip is a tiny portion of my fiction writing project.  This week Alice, our main character, is visiting Frank, her dad, and Dot, her grandmother in Florida.  Alice is 15, and she'd rather be at home with Evelyn, her mom, and Ethan, her brother:

As she worked her Speedo over her hips, Alice tried to clear the heaviness in her chest with deep breaths.  It didn’t work.  She stepped into the hallway where Frank was waiting, his jaw set and, Alice noted, slightly menacing. His undershirt stretched over his round belly and hovered a fraction of an inch above the the elastic band of his swim trunks.

“Ready,” Alice said, and Frank nodded, eyeing the baggy soccer shorts she’d pulled on over her suit.  Alice tossed her towel over her shoulder and followed Frank out of the apartment.  Heaviness dripped from her forehead into her cheeks. The pool was dark and vacant, and Alice quickly shed her shorts and dropped her legs into the water, shrugging her shoulders to her ears as she waded to waist, then chest depth.

After a few laps, she grabbed the side in the deep end and floated her legs behind her, kicking slowly.  Frank glided up beside her, inches from her left shoulder. She blanched at his proximity.

“Aren’t you having a good time?” Frank asked, a bit of sarcasm hanging behind the query.

“Yeah,” Alice said, eyes trained on the gutter, watching the water bubble down.

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Frank said.  She could feel his breath on her cheek.

“I’m really busy with finals, Dad,” Alice said.  “I guess it wasn’t a very good time to come here.”  They had made plans for Alice to be deposited at the FAU library the next day - she hoped all day - to finish the research and writing of her paper on Macbeth.

Frank grunted.  Alice kept her legs going in a flutter kick, kept starting at the concrete lip that separated the pool from the drain.
And that's #NovelSnip this week.  I need to write some more pages.  Time's been slim this week, and I've been writing in 10-minute segments.  That's not really long enough to make significant progress, I've found.  But, I'm doing my best.


5 comments:

LH said...

oh man. I love this. But I'm so worried about Alice.

LH said...

"shrugging her shoulders to her ears...."

so right on.

mm said...

... been waiting all week!

jdoc said...

10-minute segments seem to be working from my perspective. Hooray for #novelsnip!

Anonymous said...

I can feel Alice's apprehension. I wonder does Frank mean to be a concerned parent or menacing? Looking forward to more! Mom