Kimberly Pauley

So…help me pick my next project…

Kind of. Like I mentioned in my last post, I’m waiting to hear back from my agent on the Cat Girl book. Once I hear back from him, I’m sure I’ll have some changes/polishing to do on that. And I’m not really sure what my next project is going to be (possibly an entirely different book that I can’t talk about here yet). Either way, I’ve got a bit of limbo time to just muck around in.

Like most writers, I’ve got a bunch of unfinished snippets of things. So, do you wanna help me pick a snippet to play around with while I’m in limbo-land?

Here are the choices…(and yes, I’m totally breaking my rule about not posting in progress writing, but these snippets are pretty small. And I should mention these are not remotely edited or polished. Just brain dumped.)

Option 1: Serious McElvoy

Note: This would be a middle grade fantasy. I don’t really have much of a plan, other than a character. Not really sure where it’s going at all, honestly. I just like him. I don’t generally do middle grade stuff though, so it would be more of a stretch. But probably fun.

Snippet:

Serious McElvoy was dead. Not hanging-on-to-life-by-a-mere-thread or even Nearly Dead or Almost Dead, as some people in his situation might be, but just plain Dead. Squashed flat. The piano had happened so quickly while he was walking home from school that he hadn’t even realized anything untoward had happened.

You, oh gentle reader, might suppose that a person would notice something as important and life-changing as one’s own death – by piano, no less – but Serious was not your average boy. He wasn’t even your above-average boy or the even much rarer completely-above-average boy. No, Serious was something else entirely. And now, he was dead.

He hadn’t been paying much attention to things this particular Tuesday afternoon, because, in his mental list of Dangerous Things to Avoid, walking home was somewhere near the bottom (approximately number 53). Unlike dodge ball, which was the absolute top on the list and the method he’d always thought would cause his demise.

He’d always thought that the headline would read “Super-Genius Dies in Freak Dodge Ball Accident!” but tomorrow’s paper would, in fact, proclaim that “Local Eleven-Year-Old Dies In Freak Piano Accident!” They would completely leave out the super-genius part, much to Serious’ dismay.

By this time, I imagine you might just be wondering exactly how the combination of a piano and a super-genius resulted in our young hero’s untimely and quite messy death. It wasn’t so much the super-genius part (after all, Serious wasn’t even aware of the piano – though, if he had been, perhaps it might not have had such a messy result), but the part where the piano fell out of Mrs. Fiddleburner’s fifth floor parlor window and onto the sidewalk (and Serious) below.

Now, as a general rule, pianos don’t come hurtling out of the sky, but due to the unfortunate combination of a newly waxed floor, an angry house cat, an unruly and quite abusive parrot, and the butler having forgotten to lock the castor wheels on the piano…well, you get the idea.

Option #2: Hildie

Note: This would be an adult novel featuring a female hit man. Again, don’t really have any kind of plot. I just have a character.

Snippet:

I’m sure I looked like easy prey with my too-high heels, my too-short black dress, and sequined clutch purse.  At least, that was what the junkie holding me at knife point obviously thought. He probably thought I was a well-heeled (pardon the pun) hooker on the way back from a job.

And I was on my way back from a job, but not the kind he was thinking. He’d obviously missed the blood spots on my outfit, but that was the beauty of the basic black dress. It was a very forgiving color.

“Gimme your purse,” he said, and jabbed his knife in the general direction of my pocketbook.

“You don’t want it, kid. Trust me.”

He twitched, either from surprise or from whatever he was tweaking on. “I mean it,” he said. “Hand it over. Now.”

I wasn’t remotely in the mood for this. Tonight’s job hadn’t gone as easy as I’d planned, hence the blood spatter. Besides which, my feet hurt like hell. I’d been walking since 32^nd Street. Cabs tended to avoid this part of town after 2 AM. They were worried about punks like the kid holding a knife on me when really what they should be worrying about was people like me.

I smiled at him and took a step forward. His knife wavered, but then he raised it. “Don’t come any closer,” he said. “Just drop it and go.”

I raised my hands and put a little swagger in my hips as I continued to step forward. “Sweetie, I’m just trying to show you why you don’t want it.” I popped the latch on the purse with my right hand and it flopped open to reveal Lou Russo’s bloody—and very detached—hand.

He took one look and ran for the hills, dropping his knife at my feet. I grabbed a plastic bag from the pile of junk by the trash can and used it to pick it up to examine it. Cheap, with a dull blade. I stuck it carefully in my purse anyway, on top of Lou’s hand. You never knew when a knife with someone else’s prints on it would come in handy.

Option #3: Death’s Only / Adopted Son

Note: I don’t have a good introductory snippet for this one, but this would be from a scene where the kid asks his Dad (Death AKA Charlie) to show him again how he came to live with Death. This would be a YA novel told from a male point of view. It’s ultimately a love story and in a more serious vein than I normally go.

Snippet:

“Can you show me my parents again?”

“Sure,” said Charlie, and put his hand over my eyes. I could smell the chocolate he’d been eating earlier.

Old Route 62, 9:38 PM

The rain was coming down so hard you could barely see the road, but I could just make out Charlie standing off to the side. The rain, of course, didn’t touch him. He was just waiting patiently, still looking like himself and humming that little tune he’s always humming. A pair of headlights became visible, barely, heading north. Charlie’s form wavered for a second and then Death appeared, looking like an old man in long robes and cascading waves of long, silvery-white hair. Charlie always called this the Moses version.

You could just make out the couple in the car now. They were on their way home from a dinner at the husband’s parent’s house. I imagined they were laughing, maybe about a burnt casserole or something funny the dad had said, but that was probably wishful thinking. It wasn’t until the car was really close, right around the time the deer stepped out into the road, that you could really see their faces.

My mother had curly auburn hair and warm brown eyes. They widened as they caught sight of the deer and she screamed something at my father. He had brown hair and wore old fashioned-looking glasses. He swerved away from the deer, which was just standing there in the middle of the road, staring at the headlights and shakings its head back and forth like it couldn’t quite decide where to go in all the rain.

The car hit a pothole on the edge of the road and veered off to the left, aimed directly at an oak tree that must have stood on that spot for at least 50 years. When it hit, the tree shuddered all the way up like an old man. And then everything went quiet again. The deer bounded off into the woods on the other side of the road and Death went over to the car.

My father was already dead, bloody and slumped over the steering wheel, but it wasn’t him that Death was here for anyway. My mother, nearly 9 months pregnant, was crushed between the seat and the dashboard. She was bleeding everywhere – from her mouth, from her ears, from her eyes, but she managed to focus on Death as he came up to her side. She seemed to accept that he was there for her. Death leaned in and took her hand and some of her pain. She closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again, staring directly into Death’s eyes.

“I don’t want my baby to die,” she said. “Don’t let my baby die.”

This seemed to surprise Death; Death who had seen it all. He seemed to consider for a moment.

“I can take him,” he said, “He won’t die, but he’ll become like me. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Please,” she said, and managed to grasp his hand, leaving behind a red smear of blood.

Death nodded and leaned over her body. All I could make out were her eyes over his shoulder, which grew wider for a moment and then closed. She was gone. And Death stood up and walked away, carrying me in his arms.

###

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s always good to remember where you come from,” said Charlie.

Not that he meant that in a factual sense, since he couldn’t even tell me her name.

—————————————

So, any votes?

Of books and ships and sealing wax

And cabbages and kings…

Well. I’m happy to report that I finished Cat Girl Saves the Day today. Or rather, I should say that I’ve finished the *first* final draft. Though I guess it’s not really final in that I’ve already got one more thing to write up and include. So, um, well, I finished a draft of the book. Okay?

Finished enough to send a copy off to my agent, Larry Kirshbaum. I’m sure he’ll have some comments back for me. No book, after all, is ever really complete.

I really struggled with the end of this one. I had to jump my outline because I’d basically gotten to the end of where I’d outlined and realized that a) it wasn’t really long enough and b) there were too many things I needed to still wrap up and c) all of those things were necessary, but not a good note to end on. Then I just felt like I couldn’t find a good BOOM moment to end on. I finally did manage to come up with something and overall I’m pretty happy with it. We’ll see if it ultimately stands. It also felt really long and drawn out because we had company pretty much the entire month of July. I do love visitors, but I pretty much got no writing done the entire month. I did, however, see even more of Chicago than I’d ever seen before. Isn’t it weird how people don’t see the sights until visitors come? We need to make more of an effort to get out there and do stuff.

It was actually a nice thing for the book as well, since it is set in the Chicago area. I included a lot of landmarks, most real, but some made up. The Wrigley ballpark tour was Max’s favorite part of researching.

Part of the book’s background is that a movie is being filmed that the main character winds up involved with. So one of the exercises I’d done for myself was to write up a scene or two from the movie. I wound up sticking that in the book too and I think it works, though now I need to write up another one as well and work it in (Larry liked it). So right there you can already see that the book isn’t “done.”

Now comes the pins and needles part. Will Larry like the whole thing? Will the publishers he sends it to like it? Who’s he going to send it to? This is actually my first time having an agent send out a book for me. I sold my first book myself and then, even though I had an agent for the second one, it was a sequel, so there really wasn’t any “shopping” around with it. And this is my first time working with Larry too (if you followed that saga on my blog, I switched agents this last year). So it’s all new. Kinda scary.

I do like this book though. I like the main character, who I named after one of my nieces. I like the supporting characters, one of which is based on a friend of mine in high school.They’re fun. They’re funny. I embarrass them a lot.

Anyway.

Someday, I hope you’ll be out there liking it too.