And I had to laugh at your stealing comment! He’s a grumpy bugger right now because of an ear infection. :(

Congratulations to the winners!

Title: The Messiah Notebooks
Genre: YA historical fantasy

It was an average theater, a dusky atmosphere cloaked in velvet and studded with oil lamps. A curious audience filled just enough rows to keep a show running. Before, them, on the stage, strode a man.
A cautious set of eyes watched the man’s back. He was a broad-shouldered, overly confident sort of person, decided Miss Trey. Her pale face, obscured by a large set of mirrors, peered out from the wings of the stage. Something pressed against her shoulder, and she jumped.
“Not very good, is he?” asked a second man, who had appeared behind her. He was tall, and had to have to bend forward to reach her ear.
“No, he’s good,” Miss Trey said. She looked about twenty years his junior. “It’s the audience that doesn’t like him. I wouldn’t think him to be the sort of person you would want to be fooled by.”
“Ah,” the man replied, straightening up to reposition his cravat. He twirled a top hat idly through two gloved hands. “A tough crowd in store for me, then?”
“I think you’d manage,” Miss Trey said.
“Of course. Now, who am I looking out for?”
Miss Trey looked a little further around the folds of the curtain.
“That man, there,” she said, pointing. “Beard-face, two from the right in the fourth aisle. He thinks he’s got this one figured out.”
“Well, has he?”

It had served me well.

Flat and smooth, it had allowed me to put distance between myself and my pursuers. Its sightlines gave me time to hide at the first sign of another traveler, so that I could sink into a ditch or shelter beneath a bush and watch as they passed, ignorant of my presence. Whether or not they were the men seeking me did not matter. An innocent question to a wagon driver would be all that was needed to reveal my direction of travel, for there was not enough traffic to cover the passage of a limping, disfigured man.

Two days of such movement, however, and two nights without a fire were taking their toll. My left arm and leg were only recently healed enough for an extended journey and I cursed again the Saxon bastard that had cost me the full use of my limbs without cutting the feeling from them too. They throbbed and ached and I knew I would need a fire and some time to rest. Perhaps I could find a small stream from which to take a fish, or some roots or tubers to cook. There was not much bread left in my pack and this early in the spring, with the trees just beginning to attain a halo of the lightest green, the pickings to be had in the forest would be slim.

* * * * *

I followed you over from the Nathan Bransford forums and thought you needed at least one guy to enter your contest:) These are the first two paragraphs of my “completed” novel of historical fiction.

Someone approaches, the winds tell me. A rider.

They have been with me my whole life, and they swirl about in greeting the moment I leave Porden on my seventeenth birthday, the first day of my Journey. They flow past me, gentle summer breezes that tease my hair and whip at my clothing. Had I a skirt, they might gust that about, but land-kin are practical women, and not even Mother wears anything but trousers, except when there’s cause.

The road is empty this afternoon. The mines are a day’s ride from town: anyone passing through Porden did so earlier, if they traveled at all. This I doubt, for last night was the rite of Midsummer’s Eve. Mother and I, who led the townsfolk in sacred celebration, did not sleep until dawn—and we were hardly the last to retire.

I know not how long I’ll be at the mines, or where I’ll go next, but it is a place to start. A place not Anem, I admit to myself, and perhaps I might ponder that more, but this new wind greets me with news to distract even a thinker from her thoughts.

“Janni, take care,” Pix tells me. “Someone comes.”

I nod to my cat-kin, and move aside. It wouldn’t do to be trampled the very first day of my Journey.

The rider flies past us at a gallop; I barely have time to glimpse his chestnut horse, it moves so fast. As for the rider himself—
_________

Ooops, that’s 248 words! Guess I’ll stop there. ;)

A bit about the plot: Seventeen-year-old Janni is a land-kin, a healer and acolyte of the Land. As her rite of passage, she must travel the land for a year and a day, sharing her gifts. Unfortunately for Janni, she has another, deeper secret, and when it comes back to haunt her, her journey takes a much different path …

Thanks for the contest opportunity!

When you’re diagnosed with a terminal illness, everyone treats you like a ghost from the minute they find out. Like Dr. Abbot, he’s been treating me like I’m already dead since he first began treating me five years ago.
“Lindsay,” he begins softly, as if I haven’t been on the receiving end of bad news my entire life, scrubbing his big hands over worn, brown skin covered in grey stubble. He drops his wire framed glasses on the desk and adjusts his white coat nervously.
“Yeah?” I ask, maybe a little too harshly but I’m tired and cranky and would really rather be home. That’s a lie, I’d really just rather be anywhere but here. Mom clucks from beside me, she’s always thought I was too brash, but slides a warm hand over mine. Dr. Abbot sighs slowly then begins speaking again but it’s muffled and hard to make out. Just smooth, rounded vowels that it’s flared up again, come out of remission like we were expecting. Then it’s a litany of, “I’m so sorry,” and time expectancies. One year at the best. Better than nothing. He mutters something about five years being the average survival rate, how lucky we were to get this far. We? When was he diagnosed with leukemia?
Mom’s arms come around me and she’s sucking in deep breaths as she sobs, asking how this could happen and what we can do now. There’s nothing we can do and I know that, this is a terminal illness, emphasis on the terminal.

–

You’ve got to pee before you can zip up your pants.

That’s what my Nanna used to tell my mom when her family went camping and she couldn’t manage to pee in the wild. It’s a totally different experience out there, but one thing’s consistent – you’ve got to pee and even you can’t stop you.

The deal is: do it. You have to pee before you can go back to the campfire and the marshmallows. It’s all common sense in the long run.

Nanna’s advice is more priceless than it seems. It’s just a more relatable version of “get ‘er done.” Make it happen. Do your duty. Then, you can return to life.

I never had a duty. I never had to pee so badly. Until that summer.

–

And there you have it! I can’t pinpoint a genre (I hate them), but I CAN say that it probably falls within YA (“it” being the novel).

Thanks for the awesome contest!

My working title for this is THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (YA fantasy/paranormal…but no vampires)

****
My heart sinks further and further until it reaches the bottom of my feet. The closer we get to my new home, the farther we are from my old life—one that I never wanted to leave in the first place. I heave out a low, tortured sigh, and I wonder for maybe the thousandth time why we are moving to a town that I’d never heard of…a town so small, I couldn’t even find it on the map.
The car slows and then comes to a stop altogether. Dad turns in his seat to bestow a brilliant smile on me and Jacob. “We’re here, kids. Home sweet home.”
I can’t keep the grimace from forming on my face. I quickly try to recall myself, but there’s no need. He’s already climbing out of the car. Mom hasn’t yet and swivels around to face me, a reassuring smile firmly settled into place on her worried face. She reaches over the seat and catches up my hand.
“It’ll be alright, Jacks. You’ll see.”
Why doesn’t that reassure me? Oh yeah, probably because she doesn’t look reassured at all. I cast my gaze out through the window and frown. This old building is going to be our new home? It looks like it’s was going to fall down at any given moment.
****

This is the story of Jacki Jones and how she moves (with her family of course) into a crumbling old house where she inadvertantly unleashes an ancient evil that feeds off the souls of the innocent. When kids start disapearing, it’s up to Jacki (with the help of a garden gnome, a set of twins that are seriously spooky, and the resident hottie) to bring down this evil before anyone else gets hurt.

This is the beginning of Nikki’s Wish, my YA paranormal romance. I cut this off a little short of 250 words because it seemed a better place to end.

All I was trying to do was return a wallet.

I picked it up out of a crater-sized pothole and flicked the mud off. I could see its owner already halfway down the block from where I stood. He looked tame enough – leather jacket, faded jeans, dark hair that seemed to play freeze tag with the wind. He jaywalked across Nicollet Avenue, moving amongst the traffic like a porpoise fighting the surf. He skipped up to the curb and made his way down the street without even a sideways glance at the people around him. You could tell he had a purpose, a goal. A mission.

Forget about meeting dad at his office and catching a safe ride home. There were more important things to do. Like chasing a stranger through downtown Minneapolis. On a Wednesday night. At a quarter past nine. Alone.

I could imagine what my sister would have said: You have no common sense, Nikki. He could be a drug dealer or…or a murderer. I mean, come on. Where’s your head?

Ok, so maybe it was stupid, but I could feel something propelling me forward. I was like a wind-up toy springing back to life, and after so many months of feeling like shit, it was a welcome change. Besides, he looked pretty good in those jeans.