Mournful Weeps the Willow

Or just Weeps the Willow for the moment, due to the grammatically incorrect original title (as noted above).

Those wonderful people at Book-Ends are running a new contest. Today is mystery, tomorrow paranormal romance. Quoting from the Book-Ends blog, here are the genres they will be judging in the next few months:
Mystery (traditional and cozy)
Paranormal Romance/Romance With Fantasy Elements
Erotic Romance
Women’s Fiction
Romantic Suspense
Contemporary Romance
Thriller/Suspense
Historical Romance

Jessica and Kim will be judging the first 100 words of your story (rounded to the last sentence that does not exceed 100 words). Since my first true novel-length story is/was a mystery, I thought I'd enter it. The rewards, other than accolades of our peers, will be a critiqued query letter, synopsis, and the first chapter. So, here are my first 100 words (96 really) of Mournful Weeps the Willow:

Womp-wump, womp-wump, womp-wump. The wipers flapped back and forth like the hortator of a Roman galley pounding out a ramming-speed cadence. The engine raced intermittently, as the driver tried to rock his car out of a muddy rut, but it was useless. The car was not going anywhere. With a turn of the key, he silenced the engine and wipers and stared cataleptically through the front windshield, as lightning snaked its way through the clouds, peeking out here and there with the illusion of a threadbare arc.

How on earth had it ever come to this?

Shaun

The Book of Lore Final Draft Completed

I finished The Book of Lore yesterday. I will send it to my daughter to review and I'll shelve it for a while. I expect to give it about six weeks before I come back to The Forgotten World and review that book one final time before working on this one again. In the mean time, I plan to work on a new mystery, suspense, or thriller. I have lots of notes, and so, now I have to just decide on which notes to use. Hmm...

Shaun

The Book of Lore

The Forgotten World Series, as I'm calling it for now, is not one tale told in episodes, such as a trilogy. Rather, it is like the Harper Series from TSR Books. As a side note, Artis Cimber and the Ring of Winter was my favorite of the ones I read from that series, but I stopped somewhere about book 7 or 8. The Forgotten World tales will simply be a series of novels on the same subject, involing some or all of the characters in many (but not all) of the books, not unlike the way The Numa Files from Clive Cussler are written. Currently, I have five books, two are beyond the first draft stage (The Forgotten World, The Book of Lore), and three are somewhere between short story and novella length, as they were in their initial drafts. These are The Heather Moor, The Sacrifice, and The Hammer.

The Book of Lore was the first book written in the series, although I decided to break out the first part of the book as a stand-alone introduction to the Forgotten World. So, chronologically, this one became second, and The Forgotten World first. It is currently in third and final draft stage, and is probably the better of the first two tales, both in storyline and content.

The initial pitch (which will surely change):
Five years after being hideously scarred and crippled, Flynn O'Reilly finds himself in the sights of his nemesis once again. When the corrupt guard of the evil Lord Mayor of Gideon burns his woodland home to the ground, Flynn knows that soon they will return for him. Now, to save what is left of his sanctuary and his life, Flynn will have to ally himself with a dragon, a dark elf, and his old friends...if he can leave behind the bitterness that comes with being abandoned to his fate.

More on this later as I go through the third draft and revise the pitch before submission.

Shaun