The Work in Progress Blog Tour: The Twiceborn Queen

I’ve been tagged by the fabulous Ceinwen Langley in  “The Work in Progress Blog Tour”. The rules are simple:

  1. Link back to the post of the person who nominated you.
  2. Write a little about and give the first sentence of the first three chapters of your current work-in-progress.
  3. Nominate some other writer(s) to do the same.

Ceinwen sounds very busy with all her projects at the moment! She’s a working scriptwriter (with fifteen Neighbours scripts under her belt) as well as the author of The Edge of the Woods, a YA fantasy which I loved. My review of that is here.

I’m not working on quite so many things at once: basically I have two projects on the go. One is The Twiceborn Queen, the sequel to Twiceborn, which I’m busy revising.

Only … not quite as busy as I should be, because I’ve got distracted planning the revision of the first in a new series. It’s a YA fantasy called The Fairytale Curse, and is a modern take on the fairytale Toads and Diamonds. I’m very excited about it, and OMG you should SEE the beautiful cover it’s going to have—but I’ll tell you about that another time.

Back to The Twiceborn Queen, which I really must get finished very soon. I have eight scenes to go to finish the first (and biggest) round of revision.

There’s no rest for the wicked, they say, and Kate must have been very wicked in a previous life, for no sooner does she achieve her (mainly) happy ending in Twiceborn, but she’s thrown straight back into the fray to face even more difficult challenges. Now she’s not just fighting for survival against the daughters of the dragon queen, but facing the queen herself, with all the might of the empire behind her. Not good odds when you only have a ragtag band of survivors on your side.

And of course, being the sadistic author that I am, I throw all manner of complications in there, just for kicks.

So here’s the beginnings of my first three chapters, still not entirely polished (it’s still a WIP, after all):

Chapter One

They say hindsight is 20:20 vision, but still I can’t help that niggling feeling, the one that whispers that I should have known. Mothers are supposed to have ESP, right? Or at least eyes in the backs of their heads. There must have been some sign that things weren’t right, some little clue to tip me off, if only I’d been paying more attention.

Chapter Two

We spent three more hours at the hospital, answering the questions of every uniform that went past, watching the parade of police and hospital staff coming and going. Photographers and forensics, and whole hordes of other people whose jobs I couldn’t even guess at, made their way into the room, then reappeared, checking me out as they went past as if they couldn’t quite believe what I’d done.

Chapter Three

We headed across the Harbour Bridge, its great steel girders criss-crossing above our heads, their huge size making the cars below look like tiny coloured toys. Five nights ago Valeria had been perched up there like some nightmare bird, even her great size diminished by the mighty bridge.

Up next I’m nominating Pauline M Ross, author of the epic fantasies The Plains of Kallanash and The Fire Mages. I haven’t read The Plains of Kallanash yet, but I plan to remedy that soon. The Fire Mages was great, and I’ll be putting up a review of it shortly.

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5 Responses to The Work in Progress Blog Tour: The Twiceborn Queen

  1. Michelle says:

    I really love the second chapter sentence. I am interested and am adding your first book to my reading list. Good luck from a ROW80 blog hopping friend.

  2. Loved these excerpts. They definitely piqued my curiosity. I’m a huge fan of fairy tale retellings, so I look forward to learning more about your WIPs.

  3. Pingback: The WIP Blog Tour: Midnight Confessions | Tammi Labrecque