#FicPromptFriday: 7/22/16 - Waterlogged

*It rained yesterday – yay! And for the moment, the grass is a little greener; maybe my crispy pastures can get some relief. So blame the weather on the background theme of today’s futuristic continuation. Happy Friday.*

7/22/16 – Waterlogged

It started to rain late in the afternoon. Thick storm clouds stacked up to the west and scudded in, too full to do more than sit and let the wind push them over Knoxville. They carried only rain, though, and nothing dangerous, and water fell in relentless sheets past the windows.

#FicPromptFriday - 7/8/16 – Juliet

More of the future prompt nobody asked for! Largely unedited, so apologies for typos.

7/8/16 – Juliet

When she was a little girl, Lucy knew many things about her father. She knew that he liked to sit quietly and read books on Sunday afternoons; he would pull her up into his lap and she’d doze off in the sunshine, listening to his heart beat through his shirt, and the soft rustle of the pages turning. She knew that he thought Mama’s cooking was the best; his favorite was the lemon chicken, and he said that was the first thing Mama had ever cooked for him when they met. She knew he was a Lean Dog; she liked to trace the shape of the running dog on the back of his cut with her fingers. She knew he was really good at building things with Legos, and that he could make her a dollhouse without a starter kit, and that he always smelled like leather and nighttime when he kissed her good night, and tucked the blankets up under her chin.

#FicPromptFriday: 5/27/16 – Adventures in Presidential Babysitting

This week's #FicPromptFriday installment features Ghost and his grandkiddos. A short one today as I finalize details on TLC for our release this weekend. As with last time, please excuse typos - this is just for fun.

*The girls are all at a baby shower :)

5/27/16 – Adventures in Presidential Babysitting

There were four of them. Why were there four? Why had his children needed to multiply this many times?

Not grandfatherly thoughts to have, but Ghost had them all the same, as Lainie sat down on her butt and wailed up the ceiling. And of course, that woke Camille up in her swing and she wailed too, a thin, half-asleep cry that put screws through Ghost’s temples.

Extended Edition, Basically

Hi, happy Sunday! I would love to say that most of my weekend was spent consuming milkshakes (seriously, put chocolate chips in coffee ice cream and Oh My God), but I've been elbow-deep in TLC edits, with only the one milkshake.

Right now, I'm typing up one of several scenes that I'm going to be adding to the final, published edition of the book. Some that I've shared via #FicPromptFriday, and some that I have not.

There are two sides to Wattpad, the good and the bad. On the good front, I can get content to you guys regularly, and quickly. On the bad, I'm not posting chapters from a fully edited and revised manuscript; what you all read on Wattpad is more or less a rough draft. I figured the readers who were dying to know wouldn't mind a typo or two. Or three. Or four. The disadvantage, then, is that you haven't read the final, polished product.

When it comes to editing, I never quite know what I'm getting into. Sometimes I'm tickled pink. Sometimes...not so much. As has been the case with TLC. Despite the fact that this is a 116k word, 424 page book, there are some scenes I feel could benefit from expansion. And there's new content I'd like to add. I've debated with myself as I've edited this weekend, asking if I want to go through with it, and I've come to this decision:

I've always been wildly fanatical in my love for Lord of the Rings. The books. The movies. Anything affiliated. So when the Extended Edition DVDs came out? Oh boy. How wonderful. The EEs provided a more complete film experience. Nothing left on the cutting room floor. Theater-going critics might not have appreciated it, but the fans did.

So I've been thinking all weekend, and since I don't write for the critics (hello! I see you lurking) but for the fans, I decided to go ahead and bulk up the book with the extended material that's been kicking around in my head. When TLC releases, expect a fuller, more complete vision than what's represented on Wattpad. I'm dedicating all of this week to getting the book up to par with the rest of the series, and I hope you'll all enjoy the results when the final book premieres  on sales channels on the 30th.

5/21/16 Continuation of Yesterday

I decided I had to do a quick continuation of the #FicPromptFriday piece I did yesterday. Same warning applies: potential for typos, and potential for TLC spoilers.

5/21/16 Continuation

As predicted, it was taking a long time. Her contractions were much closer together now, and the doctor had said it wouldn’t be long the last time he’d taken a peek, but four hours was a long time to be in this kind of pain, in Fox’s company no less.

In the chair beside the bed, he plucked ice chips from a cup one by one and crunched them noisily.

“Those are supposed to be for me, you know,” she said.

He tilted the cup in offering.

“Oh no. You enjoy.”

Fic Prompt Friday - 5/20: Michelle

Fic Prompt Friday

Welcome to the first installment of Fic Prompt Friday! Here's how this is going to work: on Fridays - the Fridays I can make room for it on the schedule - I'll take prompts from you guys and write a little <1,000 word scene. Today's installment went just a few words over, but I trust that's okay ;)

Please be advised that this is a quick, off-the-cuff sample of writing and though I've speed-proofed it, there might be a typo or two here and there. 

*Contains spoilers for Tastes Like Candy* 

#FicPromptFriday

 5/20/16 – Michelle

Really, she thought, at nine-fifteen on Saturday night, she should have expected this. This would fall under that old Murphy’s Law thing, wouldn’t it? It felt like it would. It also felt like hell.

Bonus Scene: Jordan and Ellie

I miss them. Not sure where this is going, but it'll probably be two or three parts. Set after Dream of You.

Even More Lunch

“Walker.”

Jordan would have welcomed a building fire if it meant he could tear his eyes away from the quizzes he was grading. A third of his class had scraped by with Ds. In HPS. In glorified gym class. On a multiple choice quiz. He blinked and glanced at the open door of his office; David, Coach Wyman, stood in the hall beyond, hands in his track pants pockets, giving him a flat, humorless smile.

“Your wife’s here.”

Jordan bit back a frown; the rest of the coaching staff had found it a little too convenient that it was acceptable for spouses to attend the same college, one as a coach, and the other as a student. He wasn’t allowed to date one of his students, but there was no rule against his wife being a student. And none of his colleagues bought his lame-ass story about her transferring to KSU after they were married for a second. They all knew the truth. They all thought he was a skeeze for it.

Whatever.

Bonus Scene - Another Lunch

Sappy, fluffy, extra bit of a scene with ties to Keep You and the future. It's totally saccharine, but thought I'd post it.

Another Lunch

Then

“People are afraid of you now, you know.” Jo heard the note of pride in her voice and couldn’t bring herself to feel regretful about that. People were afraid of him – she’d heard the not-so-covert whispers behind hands; had seen the wary glances directed her way – and maybe they should be. Maybe those mocking, teasing, cat-calling, bullshitting boys should have a little respect.

Tam’s brows gave a mild jump, unimpressed, as he dug his lighter out of his jacket pocket. He clamped his cigarette between his teeth and gave her a steady look from beneath the dark fringe of his hair. “And you’re not?” he asked, and lit up in complete defiance of the crowded campus green on the other side of the bell tower.

Deleted Scene - Lunch

A deleted scene from Dream of You: a bit of fluff so sugary it makes my teeth hurt.

 

 

Lunch

Characters copyright © 2013 Lauren Gilley
 

Then

“Mom got our lunches wrong again,” Jordan announced and his thin, tanned legs folded up, dropping him cross-legged on the grass beside her. He leaned back against the hot bricks of the bell tower and dropped his gym bag off his shoulder, offered his sack lunch to her and reached for hers.

Jo had discovered as much in first period when she’d peeked into her brown paper bag and found an apple and two lidded plastic dishes, one full of crunchy peanut butter, the other cold hash browns. Barf. She accepted her own lunch – turkey and lettuce on wheat, chips, a warm Coke – and settled her shoulder blades against the bricks, eyes moving out across the campus that lay stretched before them: a maze of cobbled walks, Bradford pears with shiny dark leaves, and a collection of old brick buildings that all smelled of damp and BO inside.

Deleted Scene - That Was The Plan

 

 

That Was the Plan
(From Keep You)

In theory, change was an inevitable and good thing. People – general, run of the mill sheeple – said it all the time in some form or other. Tam had agreed in a certain way; had certain parts of his childhood, his life, changed, he might have been spared the trauma that had long ago cauterized his mental wounds. But there were things he wouldn’t have changed for the world. There were things he didn’t ever want to change – like the Walkers’ kitchen, which was, in all its outdated glory, unchanged since the last time he’d set foot on its linoleum floors. Beth Walker’s kitchen was the same as it had always been, and when he walked inside and breathed in the smell of dinner, it was like those four years he’d kept his distance evaporated. They were just a nightmare, a splash of a bad memory, and whatever had happened during that time meant nothing now.

“Oh, sweetie.” Beth was at the stove and she turned and pulled him into a hug, her fluttery hands patting across his shoulders as she squeezed him tight. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re home.”

Jo had said it; Mike had said it; Randy had said it – and now Beth was saying it too and confirming what he had, once upon a time, never dared to hope: He was home.

Deleted Scene - The Little Ones

I don't know about anyone else, but I love getting to see the deleted scenes from a movie. They're usually just fluff, but I like fluff. Most books have deleted scenes too; some are truly deleted while others, like mine, were never written in the first place but were happy little notions of fluff that the author wanted to write.

Here's a bit of fluff from Better Than You that I never got to write.

 

 

 

The Little Ones
(From Better Than You)

Mike told Tam he was going outside to see if the girls had arrived yet; really, he needed some air. Out on the terraced front steps of the courthouse, the city square choked with traffic and pedestrians spread before him, he took a deep breath down into his lungs that reeked of car exhaust and whatever was being grilled up for lunch at the pub just across the corner. He could hear the fountain, the whine of engines, the occasional snatch of a laugh, the rumble of the train two blocks away. It was a brilliant day – intense with July sunlight, unrelenting in its brightness. The world was alive with dancing heat mirages; the heat, after leaving the air conditioned courthouse, soothing and oppressive all at once. There was nothing fresh about the air he’d needed – it was fully-baked and saturated with the smells of the city – but that was immaterial. He needed, for some stupid reason he didn’t quite understand, to wait, hands in his pockets, as his mother, his fiancée, and his sisters came up the sidewalk and started up the stairs to him.

He greeted all of them, pressed a fast kiss to Delta’s lips, but it was Jo he detained with a hand on her forearm. “Can I talk to you a sec?”

The look she flashed up to him was reluctant and knowing, but she nodded.