Good Things

Written yesterday, but posted in the wrong place. Oops. 

I'm twenty-four today. I have many feelings about this, but they tend to make anyone older than me roll their eyes, so I'll leave off here. It's been a rough few weeks for me mentally--I hate winter--but today has good things. A new Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Grey's Anatomy (with Zola!), and Crash Course. Dinner with my friends. Good things. Also, I finally unpacked the latte maker my mom gave me for Christmas and holy shizznit, I may never leave the apartment again. Not like I do anyway.

Other good things are the fact that I've decided to start querying Ghost Light again on the first. I got a rejection on the full I had out (this morning. Happy birthday to me), so it'll be a fresh start. Also, I got into Cupid's Blind Speed Dating Contest thanks to the kissing scene I posted (totally exciting, because that was my Revision-in-Progress), and it'll be finishing up. Perfect timing, no excuses.

The next Maureen Johnson book comes out Tuesday. I pre-ordered from Harvard Bookstore, rather than online, because it's less than half a mile away. I forgot that about snow. I forgot that I have class on Tuesdays, and will have to walk up there with my bag, and that it's further than the bus stop I take paratransit rather than walking to. I have a major presentation that day. Picking my book up before class. Honey badger don't curr. Of course, online-orders are starting to ship, but the sooner I get it, the sooner I'll want the third one. I can wait.

This is the reasoning that started when I got denied the ARC from NetGalley.

My sorority little posted this on my facebook wall this morning. Snape's last line is particularly apt, because I do, in fact, share a birthday with Alan Rickman. Enjoy!

Another Reading!

Real update one of these days, I swear, but for Bostonians, I'm doing another New Voices reading at the Brookline Public Library on Wednesday, the 20th, at 3pm. It's the day before my birthday, so please come if you can!

CLC Kissing Scene Competition

You guys know I rarely post writing here, but this was too fun to pass up. Cupid's Literary Connection is having a kissing scene contest, and I just got to the hot first kiss in the manuscript I'm revising!

This comes from my YA manuscript FALL TO PIECES. After an accident at a concert that leads to her losing her leg, wannabe rockstar Meridian has had to forgo the transient life she has with her travel-writing mother. She moves to suburban Massachusetts to live with with her aunt, uncle and cousin, Natalie. Most people in town think she’s an attention-seeking brat, except for Kyle, the boy next door, who is the only one who doesn’t treat her like a snobbish foreigner. In this scene, they’re sitting in her front yard, waiting for her aunt to get home.

“I have a theory about why you’re avoiding me,” Kyle said.

“I’m not one of your characters. You can’t dissect me.” I reached for my crutches, but his breath was brushing my cheek in a way I couldn’t bring myself to pull away from.

“You’ve never told anyone so much about yourself. You’re used to people either knowing everything already, or not caring about the past.”

I put one hand against the trunk of the tree and lifted my butt up a couple of inches.

“Don’t.” His pressed his hand against my knee—my left knee. His face didn’t show that he’d even noticed where his fingers landed. He didn’t care.

“Your freckles,” I said, tilting his face to examine them. “They’re like tiny clusters of musical notes without a scale.” He leaned back a little and squinted at me. I smiled. He didn’t always know what I was thinking. “I wonder what they’d sound like.”

“Can you play them?” he asked. The blush in his cheeks went up a notch, and the curiosity in his eyes was even more intense than it got whenever I told him about my most fascinating Parisian nights. 

“You know it.” I pressed my lips against one of the freckles, then moved it down to the next one, varying speeds based on the width of the dots, like they were whole-notes and eightth-notes dancing around without a time stamp. “How’m I doing?”

Writer Boy didn’t respond with words. He moved his neck just enough for our mouths to meet, and in the beat before my mind processed the tingling in my lips, I realized that silence could express as much emotion as song.

Kyle kissed without desperation or impatience. He put his arms around me, but his hands didn’t go straight to my waistband. Too soon, he drew back. The flower slipped out of my hair, but he caught it. He swept it across my mouth and then offered it to me. “I just want you to know, it’s okay. You can tell me things. Anything you want. I won’t….”