Month: July 2012

Teaser Tuesday: 7/31/2012

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

It’s time for another Teaser Tuesday! I’m still in the middle of the Merrily Watkins mystery The Secrets of Pain. (I didn’t get a lot of reading done this week). Here, Merrily is visiting a bed and breakfast looking for clues to a mysterious death, as one does when one is the first female exorcist in England …

Liz took Merrily upstairs, where there were five bedrooms off the landing, the doors of all of them hanging open. A scent of fresh linen and a light musk from a dish of potpourri on a window sill.

At least it’s fresh linen rather than a face of crumpled linen this time.

And, of course, here’s todays bonus teaser from The War of the Ravels:

It was about the width of her hand, and taller than she was, with three horizontal openings at various spots along its length. If she could make herself thin enough, she could sidle through it, drop to the courtyard on the other side, and find her way out from there.

Like Wallis Simpson said, you can never be too rich or too thin. Especially when you’re trying to escape though an arrow slit.

Teaser Tuesday 7/24/2012

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

This week’s Teaser Tuesday is–wonder of wonders!–NOT from 1Q84, which I finally finished. (Huzzah!) It is, instead, from The Secrets of Pain, the 11th book in the Merrily Watkins series of subtly paranormal mysteries from Phil Rickman:

Her face was flushed, but only by the sun through the firework blaze of extreme stained glass. The new Thomas Traherne windows, four of them, were small and ferocious, with individual dominant colours: the almighty white, the crucifixion red, the pagan green.

And as always, this comes with a side helping of a couple of lines from the page I’m currently working on in The War of the Ravels.

When that faded, it grew very dark, then gradually lighter again, the illumination divided into separate pale pools. It took her a moment to spot cobwebbed arrow-slits in the left-hand wall, between the buttresses, high above her head.

Teaser Tuesday Twofer 7-12-2012

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

It’s time for Teaser Tuesday again!  I’m still reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (this book is immense, but I’m almost finished!), so here’s another two sentences from it:

And he handed her the urn, feeling a little guilty, but honestly relieved.  I will probably never see these bones again, he thought.

And as before, here are two sentences from the current scene in part two of Shards that I’m working on.  I’m going to cheat a little and include two lines of dialog; it adds up to more than two sentences, but they’re very short ones!

“But death isn’t a thing. It’s the absence of a thing.”
“How do you know that?” she asked. “Have you died?”

That’s it for this week!

Teaser Tuesday Twofer

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

First, the actual Teaser Tuesday, from the book I’m currently reading — 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami:

“He tried his best to become an invisible observer, staying quiet, keeping the effect of his presence to a minimum, silently waiting for that time to come.  As the days passed, the difference between one day and the next grew fainter.”

And now the bonus Teaser!  Just to let everyone know that part two of Shards is in fact in the works, here are two sentences from the current page I’m working on.  I think it manages to avoid any spoilers for those who have read part one:

“The dog statue itself had become animated, but the old man had smashed it to get at the contents, depriving the carven creature of a body; its jaws opened and closed as if trying to bite or bark, and its one remaining leg scrabbled futilely on the slick floor, causing it to turn in a slow circle. She felt oddly disturbed by this, as if a real animal had been harmed.”

Of course, I can’t say for sure that those two sentences will survive unchanged into the final version (in fact, I can almost guarantee they won’t), but they’re there for now.  I would post the original two sentences that they replaced, but this scene is changing almost completely from the original, so there is no direct comparison.  Perhaps next time!

Thanks to Shannon’s Moments of Introspection for cluing me in to the existence of this meme by posting a couple of sentences from Shards a few weeks ago!