Cindy, I'm with Lee - nicely written, and the curiosity factor makes it even better.

Anyone want to read some stuff I'm planning to enter in a contest? It's a first kiss contest, with the final round judge an editor from a publisher I'd love to work with. You enter a one-page set-up, plus a first kiss scene of no more than ten pages. The set-up is the hardest part. It's not actually judged, but it needs to introduce what's going on, and I'm sure the better it is and the more compelling you make the characters sound, the better off you are. I'm not at all satisfied with what I've got so far.

Anyway, can I get a couple of beta readers to look at the set-ups and then the scenes themselves?

Yup. Send. But I'm mildly time-crunched for the next couple of days - what's the deadline?

No great rush. Entries have to be received by 11/1, and I'm shooting to mail mine by 10/18 just to avoid that rushed scrambly feeling. I'll insend and then head for sleep.

Susan, I realize I don't have a track record as a beta reader here but I've really enjoyed the bits of your work you have posted and would love to help you out.

My profile address is good.

Susan, I'd be happy to read it. You can send it to either address. You want the most feedback on the setup page, yes?

Insent, AmyLiz and lisah. I'm not sure I want the most feedback on the setup page, just more than one measly page would normally get!

After that 45-second pitch experience, I never thought it would be so hard to do a one-page setup of less than half (in Anna's case, a whole lot less than half) of a novel. But it is, especially since you have to do the character and conflict stuff you'd put in a pitch, plus enough setting and backstory that the reader will know where the hell they are when they start reading the scene itself.

Sorry, Susan -- I was reading with one eye and watching the baby attack the video cabinet with the other and assumed this was from Lucy, and therefore the kiss scene I'd already read. But it's Anna, so a new kiss. Yay!

Smacking forehead... And I just read the email and saw it's both books. Cool.

Drabble for the "lies we tell ourselves" challenge.

- - -

There's nothing you can do.

The starving child on the television. The front-page photograph of the father in agony, clutching his dead son. The woman with dull eyes like holes poked into her head, standing before a pile of skulls and femurs. The bombs, the guns, the sirens, the broken glass.

You can't expect to fix these problems.

The man lying on the sidewalk next to an empty cup, slat-ribbed dog panting beside him. The teenager riding the bus, baby on her lap. The toddler with a windbreaker and no mitts.

It won't make a difference anyways. Just don't look.

(loving Dani fiercely)