ScribIntel for Unsung Authors discussion

I wrote this in my book, The Eye of Osiris:

Perhaps this is when his love-hate relationship with weak women began. Feeding his ego was his life line. And, like so many suffering from ego-mania, he wasn’t really looking for love, love was not enough; he wanted to be worshiped.

Thanks for starting this, Raquel. For simplicity's sake, I'll only post lines (by lines, I mean complete thoughts) from my first novel, Hindsight, as that's a good place to start reading me if you're interested in more. Here are a few I like (little bit of language ahead):

"It's like a room that you walk into and all the furniture's floating around. You stand there long enough and gravity kicks in, all the furniture floats back down to the floor. In the corner is a mirror. You stand in front of it and you're naked, no matter how many layers you have on. That mirror sees you for what you really are, scars and all—no fancy lighting, no glamorous touchups, nothing. You see the bruises you got from your dad as a kid when he used to drink too much. You see the scar on your chin from when you busted it at a swimming party when you were nine. You see the blushing spot on your cheek from where Brittany Spellman gave you your first kiss in the fourth grade and her handprint on the other one from when you tried to feel her up in the theater in the seventh grade. You see the blood on your hands from the first man you killed."

"I am hurtling eight stories to the pavement.
There's a bullet in my left shoulder and another chewing through my lung. I am going to die. And all that talk about your best memories skipping along in front of you like the windows of a city tram at the lunch rush, that's just bullshit. It's the stupid decisions you made that got you killed—that’s what goes through your mind in the second before you die. Take me, for example. No matter how hard I want to think about the good times, I keep coming back to the last three weeks, every detail of them in 9.5 Dolby surround sound and bright, fuckin' HD."

"Ginny's was a strip club in Camden. It was actually called The Rodeo. Most of the girls looked like they'd stumbled out of a crack house and onto the stage. But then there was Ginny. When she walked out there, she owned the place. Wild, red hair, freckles speckling her face and shoulders and tits that could hold up a liquor store."

(I should mention you can get it for free on my website: owenbanner.com. If you do, I'd appreciate a review when you get the chance, or even some feedback if there's anything you'd like to see done differently in my writing)

Thank you!

I hope this isn't too long. This is out of my (mostly) fictional memoir: "Of Knights and Lemon Fights":

The differences between attics and basements go beyond the obvious – it’s more than merely a matter of physical distance and interior design. We’d studied this, my brother and me, this “ology” of other-room science. We had done our research, gathered our information from resources that highlighted each other-room’s significance in the paranormal and the roles each play in matters of time and space, death and life, tragedy and sacredness. We found no serenity in either, only seclusion and a sort of unmitigated mystery, which also happen to be perhaps two of the most drawing factors for pre-teen boys, outside of the promise of finding old forgotten-about coin or baseball card collections.

The typical basement contains within itself the inherent appeal of, and for, all things dead. It’s a tomb. It’s a lost catacomb smoldering with the unseen smoke of spirit material. Home to ghostly exiles and the hidden-away bones of ostracized human deviants who, upon death, had failed to prove neither their heavenly worth to God, nor their hellish worth to Satan. Basement steps scream the laments of lost souls and alert the darkness’s inhabitants – spiders, rats, and the laughter and translucent forms of dead aunts – to the approach of blood-pumping life forms: food. In basements nothing is truly alive, only kept rotting and waiting behind sweating concrete walls, and held as memories in the ceiling’s plaster.

Attics, on the other hand, are the repositories of secrets. Attics of any size, from crawl-throughs to live-ins, are crammed with trapped, relentlessly haunting family riddles, unsolved mysteries long held by generation after generation of secret-keepers, both victims and assailants. They bear the memories of hidden-away children and the clothes of the long-time-dead that hover above the hardwood floors, covering some unseen, unpassed, ethereal caretaker. Attics house the uninhabitable. They store the past, the reminders of long ago questionable, unresolved deaths and inexplicable human injustices, and remind the inhabitants below, the living, of their otherworldly existences with rhythmic midnight floor-knockings and door-slammings and blinding light shining from under those same doors. Attics are the gateways to the unexplained, passageways between here and some sort of “there.” Attics bask in their possessions: here, the trunk in the corner full of old photographs with missing heads, or, over there, the yellowed and blood speckled rabbit-fur pea coat, or, underfoot, the rectangular Persian rug so adept at hiding the engraved pentagram compassed about with hardened circles of candle wax residue – ritualistic forgetfulness and sacrifices to an old ghost-mother of a ghost-mother of a ghost-mother. We loved attics most of all.

Thanks, Jeremy!

No, thank YOU for starting this! :-)

This is a great idea! Here's a few that always stuck with me...

(YA Novella) BLACK WATERS (Spoken through the voice of Link:

Secrets can be harmless, or they can be torturous inner struggles that devour you from the inside out. That is what my secrets did. The thing is, they weren’t just mine, they were ours, and they exposed a much bigger, twisted story that unraveled, costing lives—innocent lives.

(YA Novel) MY WOLF AND ME (spoken through Marina):
It was almost mystical, shadows of deception playing with my mind. His agonized cries told me nothing was happening to my mind, only his body and possibly his soul. Then male human screams erupted from the wolf howls as the form of the wolf violently danced with the form of a young man.

(NA novel) STEAL ME (spoken through Maverick):
All right, this is going to sound cheesy as hell, but you know those movies when the guy meets the girl, and she is mysteriously surrounded by rays of perfect lighting and all that unrealistic nonsense that makes your eyes involuntarily roll? Well, yeah, apparently that’s no special lighting; it’s you losing your shit! Oxygen going in all the wrong directions in your body, making you see mysterious fucking lighting. I shit you not. It’s the damn truth.

Thank you!

This is another excerpt from The Eye of Osiris about the madness that is our heart's desire:

People can lose their minds when primal instincts conflict with the intellect. Such human conflict can twist the soul, as the self condones, denies then finally chooses the poisonous fruit, even when it may lead to madness. Because there is really no end to this internal, self-inflicted, destructive conflict. And, the landfill of human tragedies grows larger and larger; simply because of the age-old, most humanistic of excuses: the heart wants what it wants. Oddly enough, it only leads to the greatest of inhumanities.

Good morning! No matter. We are all children at heart.

So happy to hear that you like this group! I am working strategies to attract readers to this group. I'll start tweeting about it today.

What's best is that this is not a contest. I don't believe in them because they are totally subjective to the judges whose criteria could be from mars!

My goal is to someday host a web tv show to introduce new authors.

Have a good day.

One more post for the day. This is another excerpt from The Eye of Osiris:

It was a foggy, misty evening around eight o’clock in North Beach. In the alleyways, you could hear a harmonica’s cries faintly echoing, pulling at you heart. North Beach was one of the few places where you could still find a few clubs that played this music whose notes struck into the depth and emotional crevices in your soul, music that can only be called the Blues.

Hi! Youtube is good but there are other alternatives. I have a lot of trouble posting my book trailers with audio. But that's another story.

Keep on dreaming because sometimes if we keep that picture in our head it will get us through a lot of rough times.

Have a great Sunday.

This is an excerpt from Osiris The Second Coming about love at first site:

Veronica was slumming in a Castro district dive with Gary, her friend from the Yosh salon. Gary was telling jokes about his clients and had her in an uproar. When the live music started, Veronica looked up on stage and to her surprise, Gabe was playing the saxophone so beautifully that she caught her breath. Gary caught the look on her face and said, "Oh oh," and turned as well.
"Oh what?" Veronica queried as she continued to stare at Gabe. "Colpo di fulmine!" Gary smiled.
"What the hell is that?" Veronica still could not take her eyes off Gabe.
"It means love at first site in Italian," Gary smiled and he held his glass of scotch in his left hand and swirled it.
"Did not know you spoke Italian. How romantic," Veronica turned for a second and gave him a glance. Then she turned her attention back on Gabe. Electricity seemed to sparkle between them.
"Sorry to interrupt," Gary commented, "I was just making an observation that is so obvious to the 30 or so people in this room."
"What, exactly are you talking about?" Veronica turned to Gary. But Gabe kept his eyes toward Veronica then closed them dreamily.
“'Colpo di fulmine' seems to have struck tonight between you and Mr. Saxophone up there. It's so obvious," Gary grinned and took another sip of his scotch.
"That, my dear, is where you are so wrong. You see, we've met before, Mr. Saxophone and I," Veronica looked like the cat that ate the bird; with feathers all over her paws.
"Really? When and how long ago. Because Mr. Saxophone looks as though he's seen you for the first time," now Gary was grinning. "Looks to me as though you have unfinished business together. That's what it looks like, uh huh. That's it, isn't it?" He stared at Veronica for a minute. "What did you do, leave him all tied up in some hotel room? Come on, you can tell good ol' Gary."

These are some of my favourite lines from 'Kenneth's Queen', a story of 9th century Scotland and the rise to power of Kenneth Mac Alpin.

In spite of her horror at the place Baena raised her eyebrows at that. “Do you even remember our wedding celebrations? We were both far from happy.”
“We were young and foolish then and are fortunate that our fathers were wiser. Not everyone in the land will be happy with this union, but they must trust my wisdom.”
Baena couldn’t help but smile. “You are right Cinaed, but here?”
Putting an arm round her Cinaed realised she was trembling. “No, not here. Not if it frightens you this much. I know that our wedding celebrations were not happy for you. But this day, the one you have worked for as hard as I, must be joyous.”
“Tell me why you thought here, this place of blood and pain could ever have been the right place for such a celebration.”
“What is the best thing to come out of our union?”
“Our children,” Baena said promptly.
Cinaed smiled. “And yet there was pain and blood then. My God, until last year I had no idea there was so much blood! But from the pain you endured and the blood you shed came the two finest sons and the two most beautiful daughters that any man was ever blessed with. And from the pain and blood of this place can emerge a new land, the finest, and the most beautiful of any on God’s Earth. A land that we shall be blessed to call our own.”
Baena looked around Scone anew, listening to the sleepy drone of the bees. This was a beautiful place with flowers growing among the grasses and the sun shining through the trees. The rich scent of gorse wafted on the breeze. There were ghosts here of course, but this place was hardly alone in that respect. Blood had been shed all over the land.
“Hold your crowning here, my love. This is the right place,”

Anna wrote: "These are some of my favourite lines from 'Kenneth's Queen', a story of 9th century Scotland and the rise to power of Kenneth Mac Alpin.

In spite of her horror at the place Baena raised her eyebro..."

Thank you, Anna!

I think this is a great idea, thanks.

Here are a couple from my SF novels. From "Run from the Stars", the scene where Jane has gone to sleep at the controls of the spaceship after being awake for sixty-six hours:

Hours later she began to wander into a bleary, partial wakefulness. She'd tried to sleep in an acceleration seat—something almost impossible to do comfortably. She winced as she realised what had happened—she'd tried to turn over in her sleep, in a seat designed to hold the occupant firmly in one position with their back to the thrust line—and the seat, with its harness, had won.
She stretched, trying to ease the stiffness, and her left hand caught the stick, deflecting it fully forwards.
The lurch as the gyros kicked in, pitching the ship nose down in response to her unplanned command, jerked her rudely and fully awake.
As the ship slowly turned, the entire span of the galaxy came into view, filling the glass from edge to edge, but now she was fifteen thousand light years above the great disk, and seeing the spiral arms laid out in their majesty as a vast diamond tapestry in front of her.
The endless curving arches of stars burned on, ageless and silent in the darkness, returning to the unwinking glory of the complex, terrible core. Somewhere, out there, in that stark, cold beauty was a region whose diameter was barely one hundredth of the whole galaxy, which was everything that every human had known. Out there, in a space that she could blot out with her thumb, on five hundred worlds, every man, woman and child, save her, lived and died, and rejoiced and mourned, and fought and made peace. And still the awful majesty of the stars burned on, tearing her soul apart with their unchanging loveliness, in the depths of their silence speaking the truths she couldn't bear to hear.
She'd been running, running from herself. She'd lost her temper with Alan, Alan was dead, and there was nobody else to blame. Life wasn't a game any more.
That—and nothing else—was what she'd to learn to live with, the knowledge she'd take to bed every night, the truth that she'd wake up with each morning.
She could run if she chose, she could try to hide—but the stars would always be there to remind her. Or she could turn back and, one day at a time, learn to live again.

And from the sequel, "Turn to the Stars":

As Lieutenant Jane Gould settled the eighty-footer into the long approach to New California's only spaceport her piercing blue eyes scanned the chronometer for the twentieth time.
Thirty miles to run to the runway threshold. Ten minutes until the spaceship's wheels touched down, then another twenty to a complete disaster. By the time she'd landed, parked, sprinted back to the terminal, and crossed the sprawl of Sacramento the one man who had the power to destroy the planet would be free.
She needed to find another five minutes, ten at the most.
Jane opened a starline connection. ‘Sacramento approach, this is Space Fleet, I will need to use a stand at the passenger terminal.’
There was a pause before the controller replied. ‘Space Fleet, persons on board please.’
‘Single crewed, captain's name is First Lieutenant Jane Gould, Space Fleet Planetary Operations.’
‘There is no stand available for a single crewed ship, you are directed to the transit park.’
‘Sacramento. I require a stand.’
‘Space Feet, there is no, I say again no stand available.’
‘Sacramento, I still require a stand. There is no need to refer this to Deep Space Control.’
‘Space Fleet, I am referring this to DSC.’
A faint smile came to Jane's lips. Give the poor man fifteen seconds to get through to Deep Space controller Spence on Homeworld, thirty to have his ears chewed off, then-
‘Space Fleet, this is Sacramento. Take stand three.’
‘Sacramento, taking stand three, thank you for your assistance.’
The eighty-footer bumped down on the composition surface, then Jane was braking and reversing thrust, swinging off the runway and rolling the spaceship to a halt.
Grabbing her weapon belt she charged out of the airlock and into the terminal building. For a moment the official on the immigration desk tried to stop her, then he recognised the Arcturian Confederate Space Fleet uniform and leaped out of her way.

R. wrote: "I think this is a great idea, thanks.

Here are a couple from my SF novels. From "Run from the Stars", the scene where Jane has gone to sleep at the controls of the spaceship after being awake for ..."

Thank you R!

These are some lines from The Eye of Osiris regarding abuse of the law:

Yes, working at this prestigious law firm had its perks. But when you’re literally typing the lines, there is no need to “read between” them. As Moriah typed and edited each answer, complaint, cross-complaint, brief and motion; she knew that this defendant law firm would some day pay the price. At some point, this bending and mutilation of the law would eventually recoil and turn around to attack like a boomerang. That day was not here, not just yet.

I've been really busy and haven't posted for a reason. I finished and published OSIRIS 333. It's live on Amazon here: http://amzn.to/2bP4U2b

Here's a line from that book:

“Hi. Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Romero. No one saw anything, but there was a van that stopped for a few minutes in front of the property. Let me look at the footage. It’s a white van for a dry cleaner’s. The name is Peggy’s Clean Panties. Wow! What a wild name!” the man started laughing.

This excerpt is to ratify anyone who loves and uses humor in their work and in remembrance of Gene Wilder, one of my favorite actors.

Great news! I have been featured in the Latina Book Club! Here's the link:

http://www.latinabookclub.com/

OMG! It's been NINE years since I wrote on this blog. Did any of you ever get discovered? I hope so.

Well, I revamped Scribintel.com. Now I've just written some advice on how to write a novel by only using your word processor and a couple of tools which will probably do most of the things done by expensive novel writing software.

I also have a page named Work to Play which offers some fun advice on getting inspired. Here's the link: https://scribintel.com/home.html

I've written a few books since my last post in 2016. Check out my site: https://www.rzfbooks.com/

Hope all is good and well with everyone who contributed to this blog. Let me know if you try the suggested exercises on the website, i.e. wearing costumes, etc.

Gracias!

Raquel