The vacationing Carrie has a work in progress meme:
Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.
So, here’s page 123, paragraph with sentence five in it:
She issues the cyborg an order. "You. You drive us home."
You’ll note it’s still in present tense because I haven’t gotten that far in the revision yet. (The cyborg is a Secret Service agent, by the way.)
And, since that was so teeny, here’s the paragraph in question from page 23, which has been revised (for now):
It wasn’t like I’d fainted or run a marathon or anything hard, only lost everything I thought I knew about the world. Except that it was falling apart–I was apparently right about that.
Now you.
Okay. This is a fun exercise! Here’s mine:
He thought about it for a moment, and she could see, in that transparent way of children, how he was working hard to pull himself together. He knew now that she couldn’t save him, that she was useless—even worse than useless. She was somebody that he had to work to save, to allow her her little delusions that things were going to be all right. She saw it in his eyes, that he had resolutely decided to go along with the cheerful tone. He kept hold of her thumb and ran his hand in circles around it, just like where a ring would go. Then he swallowed—that swallow nearly killed her—and said in the bravest voice he had, “Well, are you going to stay here with me until I have to go on the airplane?”