SOPHIE LI

Happy Hump Day everyone!

WIPpet Wednesdays is a blog hop where writers can share a snippet from their WIP (Work in Progress). The only stipulation is that the excerpt is somehow related to the date.

Be sure to check out some of the other lovely WIPpet snippets here. Thank you Emily Witt for hosting.

My current project is a new-adult contemporary novella titled Together We Will Live Forever (tentative.) It tells the story of Olivia, a neuroscience grad student and an aspiring artist, and Matt, a man who works at the art gallery and lives with his daughter, Zelda.

This week’s snippet is a memory from Olivia’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Rudy. For more context, check out this super-short one from a few weeks back.

(WIPpet Math: 57 sentences for July 5.)

He was still wearing the same red polo shirt from their Calculus class in the morning. His hair was still in the same messy state, black bangs sweeping across his eyebrows. In class, she had joked about how badly he needed a haircut. In every way, he was the same old Rudy. But somehow, he wasn’t.

He strummed a last chord. Then, silence.

Olivia remembered to take a breath.

He turned and looked in her direction. She froze, like a deer in headlights. She realized that pine needles could do little to disguise a whole person. Caught redhanded, she swallowed and took a step forward.

“Um,” she began. “That’s a nice song.”

“Thanks,” he said and smiled his usual smile. The same sheepish smile when he had admitted to not knowing trigonometry.

“Sorry that I, uh,” she said, her voice trailing off.

“Ah, no worries. It happens.”

He wasn’t angry. In fact, he didn’t even seem surprised. As if people stumbled upon him playing in the park all the time and stopped to pay their compliments.

Then it struck her that maybe that did happen all the time.

“So, uh, who sang the song?” She asked to fill the silence.

“Me.”

She frowned, puzzled. “You?”

“Yeah, me.” He said with a hint of pride.

Then the realization hit her.

“You mean, you wrote this song?”

“Yup.”

She was speechless as she searched his eyes. He wasn’t lying.

“That’s… that’s incredible.”

“Thanks,” he laughed and rubbed the back of his head, which only roughened up his already-messy hair.

“You should, like, be a professional or something.”

“Nah,” he said, shrugging. “I kinda just do it for fun.”

“God,” she exclaimed, throwing her hands up. “To think all that time you waste doing math.”

“I know, right?” He pulled open his guitar case, laying it flat on the picnic bench.

Olivia wanted desperately to tell him to not put the guitar away and keep playing. But what would she do, stand and watch? She kept her mouth shut.

“So, um, what’s the song called?” She asked, another question to fill the gap in their conversation.

He nestled the guitar in the case, then zipped it up from bottom to top. He turned to look at Olivia, locking her brown eyes in his own brown eyes.

“Olivia,” he said.

She waited for him to say something else. Like, “Olivia, let’s go work on some derivatives, or whatever you call those,” or, “Olivia, you got something on your face.”

But he didn’t.

It was just, “Olivia.”

She could melt into the ground and become one of the grass, there and then, except she would never fit in with the grass, now that she was completely and utterly a deep shade of red.

A quick Camp Nanowrimo update: I am 5560 words in (a bit behind). I realize that between work, pole dancing, and the blog, I am lucky if I have an hour each day to write! Hoping to catch up during the weekend.

What are you working on this week? For the Camp Nano-ers out there: How is it going? Do you have a snippet?