If you haven’t yet checked them out. . .you might enjoy “Real-life Writing’s” free monthly newsletters.
March’s newsletter, https://bit.ly/3PP68e3, offers the original first chapter to Lies, replaced when I started Lies in a less blood-thirsty manner:
“It would almost be worth going to prison.
Just for a moment, I let myself picture the look of surprise on Mike’s face when I plunged the knife into his belly.
To be acquitted, I’d have to have a jury made up of divorced women. Or women who lived with an abuser themselves, or maybe worked for a bully boss, though it was worse when the bully was someone who used your love against you. What he’d done to Linc, Carly and I had been a crime. But killing Mike wouldn’t undo the damage he caused my children and me. Worse, our kids would lose two parents. I jerked my mind away from phantom revenge thoughts to focus on what mattered now.”
The March newsletter also offers the beginning of a ghost story:
“The knocking woke me at three. Outside the window, a silver moon crescent hung askew.
I crept down the steps, saw the freezer door open, heard the clink of ice cubes against glass. When I moved into my new house, I had no idea she still lived here.
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I bought the house.”
“Not from me.”
Three guest authors (invited in the February newsletter) added lines that continued the story in three new and completely different directions.
December’s newsletter, https://bit.ly/3RuKwUi, offers Her Next Hero’s original first chapter, cut when I began the novel with a more devastating first scene. Here are the first 115 of the 855 words:
My first impulse was to turn around and get the hell away. Head home and curl up in bed with a book, a wedge of Cadbury’s and a cup of orange spice tea. Have my own private New Year’s Eve.
No. Not tonight of all nights. Three years and a day since, no, don’t let my mind go there. And not after driving seven miles through blowing snow on icy roads to get to this New Year Eve’s party in a house the size of a small hotel at the top of Glacier Road. Raucous party noise, like an angry ocean, blasted through the partially opened redwood door. Not after promising myself my life would change. continued in the newsletter
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Happy reading!