Thanks to Helena over at Love…is a Mystery for tagging me in this meme game…

The official rules state I must take my most recent work in progress or current manuscript and search for the word “look,” then post the surrounding paragraphs/text.

Uh, okay…no guarantees on quality using this approach.

Since there’s no word limit, I selected a sequence that felt more complete. This excerpt is from The Tsar’s Granddaughter, one of the stories in my upcoming release, Passing Judgement.

Ivanka walked out of the corner market with half a green burrito clutched in her left hand and the lottery ticket in her right. She was looking at the two lines of numbers for no real reason when she bumped into a man wearing a hat.

The stranger had just stepped away from the payphone, the one everyone used to call tips into the cops, dial up their drug dealer, and pretend to be concerned citizens when a fire lit up the night. The neighborhood kept to itself. She knew the guy in the hat didn’t belong. He stared at her with a funny expression and reached for her arm. She pegged him as a debt collector, probably hunting her old man. No matter how many times he said he’d done with the gambling, the cards and dice lured him back. Ducking sideways, Ivanka avoided the grasping hand and slipped around the bumper of Jimmy Nikolav’s cab. She crossed the street.

Hat Man followed.

Ivanka turned to the right and shot inside the Russian deli, shouting good morning to the proprietor as she dove for the rear exit. Mama Stepanovna had changed her diapers as an infant, wiped her nose during the tomboy years, and swatted her teenaged head when she’d talked rude to an adult. The woman would recognize the possibility of pursuit and fill the empty wake of Ivanka’s passage with her considerable bulk. The stranger in the hat wasn’t getting past the matriarch whose grandmother had once attacked a Bolshevik party official with a pitchfork.

She evaded the collection unit and reached the apartment to discover the door busted wide. The interior was empty, her father gone.

Now I have to tag five more writers so they can share their WIP progress:

1. Jennifer Burke because this is payback I’m returning the favor…
2. Kristal Hollis because she writes about sex-robots – for reals!
3. Julie Glover because this ROW80 star keeps writing the good stuff.
4. Debbie Johansson because she’s crazy enough to NaNoWriMo too!
5. Bridgette Booth because she’s on seasonal hiatus and won’t know she got tagged (muuaaahhhhahahahaha).

I was too cowardly to offer up a sample of my current NaNoWriMo because wow…it’s really bad.

http://www.linkytools.com/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=173224