Hello! Boy, I haven’t updated in a while. I’m poking my head up from NaNoWriMo, where I’m doing well (current word count: 37,080).  I went to the 28 hour write-in tour last weekend, which was all kinds of wacky fun, although most of the words I wrote were awful. Really, really awful. Oh, well, as some of my wrimo friends say: Embrace the crap!

Here’s a quick excerpt from my novel Flight (note that since this is from Nano, it’s even MORE ‘not edited’ than usual):

“Wings.”

Vincent froze, his heart beating double time. Spinning around, he saw a girl staring at him. “You have wings,” she said.

He reached over his shoulder, patting his shoulder blades. Nothing. He stared at the girl. She smiled. “I can see them, but no one else can. You hide them, don’t you?”

Vincent glanced around, looking for a parent and seeing if anyone was paying attention to their conversation. No parent, and nobody was looking at them for more than the second it took to walk around them. He stepped closer to the girl. “How can you see my wings?”

She was about twelve or thirteen, with light brown hair tied in a braid. Shrugging, she said, “I can see things like that. Usually I can see what people _do_, but you’re the first one I’ve ever seen with wings.”

For the second time that year, Vincent felt like he’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. He stepped over to the wall to get out of the way of the foot traffic and motioned for her to do the same. “You can see my wings?”

She nodded. “They’re black, like crows’ wings. No one else has ever seen them.”

He took a shaky breath and rubbed the side of his face. Ever since the wings had first appeared, he’d been trying to hide them, afraid of how people would react. Although he wasn’t big on conspiracy theories, he couldn’t help envisioning being carted off to a secret lab. Somehow, he could make the wings disappear at will, and now here was this girl saying she could see them.

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.” She smiled. “I think they’re beautiful.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “Um, thanks.” He looked around again. People looked at them, but it was all fleeting glances. “You said you can see what people do. What does that mean?”

She tugged at the hem of her shirt. “Well, it’s only been a few times. I saw a man that could find things, and a woman that could move things by thinking about it, and another woman that can talk to the air. I think she can fly like you.”

Twilight Zone for sure. Or maybe a comic book. “So you see people with, like … super powers?”

“Sort of. It’s more like … magic.”

“Magic,” he repeated. Curiosity warred with the urge to get the hell out of here. What if one of his coworkers saw him talking to this girl? Fear won out. “Look, I’ve got to get to lunch, okay?”

She looked like she wanted to say something else, but she nodded. “Okay.”
He stood for another moment, then turned and went down the street. The urge to look behind him was strong, but he resisted. He ate half his lunch and picked at the rest, his shoulder blades itching. He focused on keeping his wings hidden, fearing as he had so many times before that if he thought about them they might appear. He thought about the girl, too, and what she’d said. She couldn’t be making it all up, because she’d been right about his wings. If she was telling the truth about that, did that mean she really _had_ seen the other people she said she had? Other people with powers as impossible as his wings.