Six Sentence Sunday #22

Welcome once again, sixers! One more snippet from my manuscript Badger: A Strange Tale of Love, Sex, and Vigilante Justice, and we'll move on to something else next week. This is from the same scene as last week's six, a couple pages onward. (If it's your first visit, the heroine is a recovering Vicodin addict and the anti-hero is a vigilante cyclist with a grab-bag of psychological disorders.)

I sat cross-legged on the bed, leaving a few inches between our thighs.

In the dim light of my reading lamp, I could make out a tidy ribbon of raised lines along the outside of his left arm, like he was the most OCD, perfectionist self-mutilator in the world. Clean and uniform, an inch wide and as perfectly parallel as corduroy. As though he’d held a comb to his skin and drawn a razor between the teeth. It made me feel close to him, this proof that he, like me, sometimes did stupid shit to himself in the privacy of some lonely room, somewhere. It reminded me of my art, the obsessive strokes of my X-Acto blade cleaving paper, and the calm it brought me to get lost in the slices, the ritual, the repetition.

If you want to check out the other Badger excerpts, you can do so by clicking here.

Thanks for reading! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week!

Six Sentence Sunday #21

Welcome, sixers! Yet more this week from Badger: A Strange Tale of Love, Sex, and Vigilante Justice. The anti-hero has just turned up at the heroine's apartment, bleeding from a bicycle accident.

I loitered in the threshold as he soaped and rinsed his hands, dried blood washing away to reveal injuries slightly less gross than I’d feared. But they needed wrapping. Once he’d splashed his scrapes with alcohol, I devised the world’s most ghetto Ace bandaging, duct-taping folded paper towels to Badger’s palms. It looked profoundly pathetic—nearly as pathetic as the zing I felt, touching him. Helping him, as homely as my nursing efforts were. Again, a flash of that dopey romanticism, as if my tending to his wounds would endear me, imprint me on his scabby black heart, the way he was stamped on my soft, bruised one.

If you want to check out the other Badger excerpts, you can do so by clicking here.

Thanks for swinging by! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #20

Welcome, sixers! More this week from Badger: A Strange Tale of Love, Sex, and Vigilante Justice. Here's the title character, the Badger, talking to the heroine about his grab-bag of mental disorders (a semi-continuation of last week's six).

“I have a really nasty temper, and no restraint. I’ve basically got no impulse control, so I do whatever I feel like, the second I feel it. I’m also into really fucked up sex.”

“Oh.”

“Plus, since I got no impulse control, I tell girls I just met that I’m into really fucked up sex.”

“You don’t say.”

If you want to check out the other Badger excerpts, you can do so by clicking here.

Thanks for swinging by! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #19

Happy Sunday, everyone! Well, my weird-ass work-in-progress is no longer a work-in-progress, so I should really just start referring to it as Badger. It's pretty much done, barring some final edits, nearly ready to be foisted upon unsuspecting literary agents.

Here's the Badger, a cut-rate bicycle vigilante, explaining to the heroine what drives him to assault litterers and bad drivers with a paintball gun.

“When I see something that pisses me off, it’s like…” His gaze jumped all over, as if the words he wanted might be scrawled on the walls or windows. “It’s like hell opens up inside my head. Then I chase, and I do something to even the score, and cold, blue water fills my skull, and all the anger goes hissss.” He closed his eyes as though meditating, wriggling fingers miming dispersion. “Just steam, and I can breathe again.”

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #16

Another snippet from my weird-ass work-in-progress. I'm currently at 93,000 words and praying I can wrap this beastie up within the week. Here's the book's anti-heroine explaining the vigilante anti-hero, Boston's bicycle-riding, paintball gun-wielding, bargain basement-quality Batman.

The Badger fights violence with violence. If you ding a pedestrian or cyclist with your car, he’ll smash your mirrors off with his U-lock. But if it’s something less heinous, you just get balled—run a red light or splash somebody with dirty puddle water, and he’ll nail your window with a white pellet shot from a Glock-style paintball pistol. Harass or intimidate somebody on the street, or generally be a dick in any way to your fellow man and get caught—thwack! big white bird-shitty splatter all over your nice new coat.

Given what a career coward I am, you can see why I’d find the Badger both terrifying and hugely compelling; I hate a scene, and he’s a human scene. He’s everything I’m not and can’t ever be, not outside of painkiller withdrawal.

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #15

A bit more from the anti-heroine of my weird-ass work-in-progress this week. I'm determined to finish the first draft of this sucker in the next couple weeks. Just 15,000 words to go.

The only time in my life when I could have been described as anything resembling brave would’ve been the not-quite two years I spent addicted to Vicodin. For the second half of that period I moved back in with my parents, so they could “keep an eye on me”. Or keep an eye on the wild animal they’d invited to inhabit their house, sleep-walking through her days, hungry and snarling when the fleeting pacifism of chemical hibernation wore off. When I came down from those suckers and wanted more, I was ballsy. I was fearless and I was dumb as shit, and I’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #14

Greetings once more, my sixy beasts! Something a bit different this week, from what I've been calling "the weird-ass work-in-progress." Not entirely sure what genre the thing even is. It's got a romance (a strange one) and explicit sex, but it's not romance or erotica… Anyhow, it's weird. Enjoy!

Amanda and I are fraternal twins, and our eggs were as different as scrambled and Fabergé. Amanda is perky, fair, pink-cheeked, with irises like gems cut out of the pure blue sky, whereas I’m thin and dark, with what my mother calls “gypsy eyes”, probably to try to make me feel mysterious or interesting. Hangover eyes, a bit squinty, their edges the color of a ripe bruise.

I was a deferring pregnancy, a wispy shadow hiding behind Amanda’s robust fetus that my parents didn’t even realize was a second daughter until nearly the third trimester. A uterine wallflower, that was me. Amanda burst forth screaming and vibrant, and I slipped quietly into the world behind her, never one to want a fuss made.

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.