Prologue for Beautifully Broken – Part One

ARC’s of Beautifully Broken went out a matter of days ago and reviews are already starting to come in! I thought I’d share part of the Prologue with you today. If you’ve read the first story in the series, Finding Destiny, you’ll recognize that this Prologue takes you back into the story, giving you the inside scoop of what happens when Matt, Felicia and Natalie take off to rescue Natalie’s truck from a snow bank.

Prologue: Wake Me From This Nightmare

My hands are freezing. It feels like my fingers might fall off if I don’t finish this job soon. It’s funny what a little bit of pussy can do to a man. Felicia has me eating out of the palm of her hand. She wants her friend’s truck fixed. I’m a mechanic. It only follows that I fix the truck, get her friend on the road and get Felicia and her wild ways back in my bed.

I am so eager to get her alone again that I agree to an onsite visit. I open the door to my truck and the three of us cram in. I shift her into four-by-four and we set off past the place where I’d met Felicia a matter of hours earlier.

Writing your first draft is a labor of love.

I’ve suffered a horrible loss of my WIP, Beautifully Broken (Book 2 in the Destiny Series), yesterday. The file is corrupt. I’ve gone from 32,500 words to 15,000 words – and this is after I’ve recovered bits and pieces from emails, backups of my electronic notes and scraps of paper from the past three weeks that had yet to make it into the shredder. Maybe I should have renamed the story while I still had the chance. Would it have made a difference?

A nightmare is what it is.

I’m sharing part of my Prologue with you now, so you can see why I’m so devastated for losing over 17,000 raw words from my first draft. That’s a lot to lose at this stage of the game! Following is 1,355 of Matty’s words that I thought I’d lost forever.

Excerpt from Prologue

Even with my snow gear on, it’s frosty. The snow starts to rain from the heavens, covering the road with a wave of white blankets. Even with the hood of the truck blocking the wind, a blast of snow whips around it and slices across my face.

Felicia rolls down the driver side window and peeks her head outside. “Need any help under there? Whatever you’re doing, it’s not working.”

“I can always use your hands, doll. But not this time. I think I’ve got it. Give it another try.” I catch a look at her smile before she escapes from the blistery weather and reefs on the handle to roll up the window in the truck.

I’m still smiling, as she revs the engine in the aged truck. I knew it. I am the man. I hear a resounding wail of the horn and imagine that Felicia is celebrating, but then I jump from the loud crackle in the air. A resounding screech echoes through my ears and deafens me, as the hood seems to turn into the mouth of a crocodile and clamps down onto me like vicious jaws. The twisted wreckage wraps around me, and sandwiches my body precariously against my own truck.

Pain sears through my side and bolts right to my foot, as I gasp for air that can’t seem to reach my lungs. Starved for oxygen, dizziness settles in, but it doesn’t even numb the pain screaming across every inch of my lower extremities.

I’m moaning now. It hurts so bad. I don’t know if one can handle a pain like this. I think I’m going to die. That doesn’t sound like such a bad idea right about now. It feels like a waterfall of blood is spilling down my body and I’m suddenly very tired. I’m afraid to close my eyes though. I’m fighting for a breath as it is. If I fall asleep, I’m afraid I might forget to try and breathe at all.

There’s A New Sheriff In Town

CO – Denver Sheriff Badge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Woo hoo!! So I just finished edit number one of book two in The Twisted Trilogy. I’m really quite excited about it. Twist and Turn is well on its way to publication. And I love it!! I even managed to give it a happy-for-now ending. Oh, but just wait for book three!!

I almost want to keep on editing right into book three, A Twist of Fate, just so I can remember all of the crazy good scenes I had written. But I am determined to get one more round of editing out of the way for this book, so I can get it out to my beta readers.

For those of you who have read Twisted, you know it is largely about the relationship between Abigail and Edwin, entirely from Abigail’s perspective. In Twist and Turn I decided to mix it up. Oh, was that ever fun!!

Prologue Or Not Here I Come

Fake car accident. The vehicle on the picture is an FSO Polonez MR’89. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s my prologue (in rough draft) for TWIST AND TURN, book two in The Twisted Trilogy. I used a prologue to give the readers a glimpse at the paranormal aspect of this novel. I feel that it is very significant and, since my book is written in the first person (Abigail’s perspective), this is a way of seeing it through someone else’s eyes. It’ll tie in later, to make you say ‘whoa’.

So now you know. Abigail’s not crazy. Or maybe she is, for leaving Edwin. But she actually is seeing dead people. (At least one dead person in particular. J

PROLOGUE

~

Six years earlier.

TESSA CLARKE WIPED THE tears from her eyes as she sobbed out of control. She was miserable, but certain she was doing the right thing.

“This is my daughter, he’s not taking her from me,” she cried, as she sped away from her home with no intention of turning back.

She squinted through the dirty windshield at the dark night with blurry, enraged eyes and a heavy foot. She dangerously weaved through cars on the highway until she reached her exit. Relief overcame her when she finally passed the City’s boundaries and dirt began to plume behind her on the freshly gravelled country road.

She looked in her rear-view mirror flashing a glance into the back seat. “I finally did it baby. I did it for us,” she said, a soft smile creeping onto her downturned lips.

A sudden flash of red light blinded her as she turned her tired, burning eyes to the oncoming headlights.