Balancing Act: the 777 Challenge

Monday, August 31, 2015

the 777 Challenge

So, I'm friends with Tegan Wren, author of Inconceivable! due out in November 2015 (which I reviewed here on Goodreads). She tagged me in a writer game that's been going around the blog-o-sphere: the 777 Challenge. The idea is to share seven lines from the seventh page of a work in progress. Then tag seven other writers to do the same.

Tegan asked for lines from the sequel to my debut novel Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel. So, these 7 (ish, I cheated a little) are from the first chapter of that book (working title: Change of Life). This section features Linda Alvarez, a crowd favorite character. When Linda went through the change, she changed more than most people do. In fact, these days, most people know her as Leonel.

Linda/Leonel Alvarez as drawn by Charles C. Dowd

So, here's a bit from page 7, when Linda is in a training session for her new job with the mysterious Department (of what? That's the mystery!). She's pumping her trainer for information while she's pumping iron (a LOT of iron).

She kept her questions vague, as if she didn’t know the names of the other people involved. “I hear that they took the fire-throwing-lady someplace. Did they get anything out of her to help with the search for the crazy doctor?” Linda didn’t say it aloud, but she had been plagued with bad dreams about that day. She was especially worried about the part she had played in Jessica’s injuries and, even though it had been in defense, she regretted the force she had applied to Helen. She should have been able to solve that problem in some other way. Throwing a sixty-something-year-old woman into a brick wall was just wrong. She’d been praying that the woman had survived her injuries. She didn’t want murder on her list of sins.