Sara... that girl on the book cover? Yeah, her. She lives in my head, in my imagination more specifically.
Lately, she has been begging me to continue her story. After a tragic past, she's finally found her new family, and I thought she was happy. I thought they were all happy and I could go on with my normal life spitting out some children's books here and there, and I could be happy, too.
Well, Sara has recently and very clearly made me aware that she is not happy at all--that in fact, her story is the only story that really matters and that should be my sole purpose. My characters get a little self centered sometimes.
Okay, I get it. No more goofing off. It's time for book 4.
Okay, Sara.
Okay.
Here's a little taste of the story she's told me so far. Enjoy.
And thank her for this opening. She's the one with the problem. I'm just her ghost writer.
"Sara crept down the dark staircase, careful to skip the third step that creaked loudly enough to wake old RVW from his twenty year sleep. She didn’t want to alert anyone to her descent. What she heard… or more specifically what she hadn’t heard… jarred her awake during the middle of a very realistic nightmare. She hardly recognized the shadows of furniture in the living room as her feet found the cool floorboards of the landing. Tilting her head to listen, she paused, her breath so shallow the others might have thought her frozen in time if they were awake, too.
And, why aren’t they awake? She questioned, believing she might still be in the nightmare. No, the sudden deafening silence had slipped beneath her covers to alert her that something was very wrong. As she stood, hand on the finial, not one sound—no fan, no A/C, no fridge—invaded the space around her… nothing. Where were the sounds that filled Nathan’s grandparents’ house five years ago after she had found her new family, after the twelve of them moved in and took it over? Memories brought a brief smile to her lips, but the silence quickly wiped it away. She tiptoed quietly to the center of the living room and turned in a circle, scanning her environment, the darkness, for a cause. It was as if the house, the twelve of them, had been placed in a sound proof bubble. For a second, she believed it a prank by one of the others, but sound control wasn’t a power they shared… yet. Besides, her instincts told her this was something else, something threatening and dangerous.
As she moved to the center of the room, head cocked and desperate to hear noise, any noise, that indicated she was still in Paradise, Texas, the front door blew inward without the crash that should have followed, and a deeper darkness eased into the foyer. Sara opened her mouth to call out to the others, but realized they wouldn’t hear her. She retreated into her mind, reaching out telepathically to alert her eleven housemates, but a terrible ringing from inside her mind broke her concentration.
The darkness drew nearer."
What now, Sara?
Oh, yeah, that. Sorry. It's been a while. I forgot you don't spell your name with an "h". I fixed it. Okay?