If you’re unfamiliar with WIPpet Wednesday, it’s a great weekly meme hosted by Emily Witt where authors can share excerpts from Works in Progress. I have greatly enjoyed reading others’ WIPs and getting to know other authors’ stories.
Today, I have a section from my 2nd Manuscript.
Math: 6/8/16 = 8 paragraphs. They’re fairly short, don’t worry lol.
No romance this week. I’ll try to post more ‘romantic’ snippets though :)). But this scene is something I edited recently. Very new – ish. The whole family scene during Christmas was completely revamped That said I would not mind any thoughts/suggestions/critiques/ideas that you have on this scene.
Context: Serena is hanging out with her entire family in the front room after a lovely Christmas dinner. I’m trying to convey here, that Serena is still very anxious, and that she feels rather inadequate in comparison to her brothers (2 who are younger, and attend college somewhere else, one who is older, and recently married.) Some of that is more evident in the previous paragraphs. But anyway…here you are
Marcus returned his gaze to Serena. “Where’s that boyfriend of yours? Wasn’t he supposed to come? When you going to pop out a kid?”
“Marcus!” Her mother’s growl shattered the hum of conversation into silence.
Serena couldn’t breathe. Damian jumped up, reached his brother in three strides and pummeled him on the head with a couch pillow. Marcus yelped in protest, throwing up his arms to protect himself. Jordan jumped out of the way and sprawled on the floor laughing so hard he had to cough to catch his breath. He wasn’t the only one laughing.
“Stop, both of you!” Her father stood up, taking a step forward.
“Certainly not until she’s married,” Her mother snapped once she’d regained her composure.
“What is wrong with you?” Damian scolded before he stalked back toward his spot next to Celine. [Her sister-in-law] Her mom, dad, and Celine pinned fierce glares on Marcus, daring him to utter another word. He chose not to. It didn’t take long for conversation around the room to resume.
Catching her own breath, Serena rose on unsteady legs. Heart pounding, she picked her way through the crowded room, ignoring every curious glance. In the hall, a hand on her arm caused her to gasp and whirl around.
“Celine…”
That’s all for now. I will do my best to make rounds to you all this week! I have been trying to do so more often. Leave me a link to yours if you want and I’ll come check it out!
Comments
7 responses to “WIPpet Wednesday – June 8th”
You definitely got the sense of Serena being off-kilter here. She’s clearly got a lot to deal with in these brothers of hers. Why do I get a bad sense though that she and Marcus have had some kind of falling out… and that she might be pregnant too. 🙁
As a side note, you may want to go back to the WIPpet linky page and fix the link you put in for this page. It wasn’t to here but rather to your WordPress Stats page. And though I was able to eventually get it to your main page by cutting and pasting info (after stopping the page from loading because it kept trying to go to MY stats page instead)… a lot of people probably won’t want to go through that.
lol that’s so weird. I’ll fix it. Thanks! No she’s not pregnant but that’s pretty good out of context guess !. To find out what happened previously, check out the Excerpts catagory link and you should be able to catch up on other WIP posts 🙂
Yeah, you could definitely sense she’s anxious here. Definitely felt her nerves. I was wondering if this was normal sibling bantering, or is there some tension that goes deeper. Great snippet.
lol. Thanks!! I think the boys are just being boys. But good point. I tried to make it humorous but at the same time with that slight anxiousness. Serena hasn’t told them anything about her b/f’s abuse and that they’re no longer together etc.and at this point, doesn’t want to
This whole scene is new to the WIP as i mentioned and the WIP itself needs work in terms of the details of character dev. This has been my hardest WIP lol. But I think in imputting this scene, I wanted to show that she’s embarrassed, that she’s still coming to grips with her decision to leave him. Thank you for stopping by I appreciate your comments
Reading the first in the series, these excerpts suddenly have a bit more meaning. I love how you’re focusing on Serena’s character for the second one! These are helping me to get a better picture of Serena’s character as I’m reading Second Chances 🙂
Another great snippet!
I think the anxiety was evident here, and definitely a sense of something deeper surrounding the issue of the boyfriend and potential children than just not being married yet.