Here’s a snippet from my novel I’m working on rewrites for at the moment. Hoping to have it ready to start sending around in the next couple of months.
Setup: Suzie and Fred are a couple of kids who stumbled upon a very unusual scene in the woods of their subdivision. Little do they know this is just the beginning of the horrors they’ll find as the mystery unravels.
The blood didn’t just stop at the ground level either, and in fact went up the sides of several trees in the clearing. Much farther up in fact, so that the victim must have been off the ground when it was attacked.
“There’s so much of it,” Suzie whispered, hating how loud her voice sounded out here.
Fred’s voice was hushed as though he was thinking aloud. “It must have been pretty big to have had so much. But how did it get so high?”
This is a pretty dark YA piece that I’ve been working on for the past year. What can I say? My first novel needs a bunch of edits before I’ll be comfortable testing the waters. I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s too dark to be considered YA though. It’s a blurry category, so I’m torn with it.
Be sure to drop by Six Sentence Sunday to check out what else has been posted today!
Great six! Good luck with your revisions.
Thanks Emily! Revisions are always tough, even more so when they’re from folks you know. 😉 I’m glad you enjoyed it!
*chills* Very dark six. Nice
Thanks! It’s pretty dark and it’s only chapter one. It only gets darker from here, and the second book in the series even more so.
Interesting intro
Thanks Lindsay! I’m glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for dropping by!
Well, I like dark, so this works for me. Good luck on the edits!
Oh good, I’m glad I’m not the only one. =) Thanks, the edits are pretty massive at the moment, but seeing the comments so far on this really makes me inspired to work on it some more!
There are some pretty dark YA out there… I wouldn’t worry.
Well that certainly gives me some encouragement! I went to a YA panel at Dragon*Con over the weekend, and got a good spectrum about how dark some YA work is out there. I guess compared to some pieces, mine is pretty tame!
Gruesome. I like how you kept the kids hushed — adds to the atmosphere.
Thanks Monica, I really enjoy setting up the atmosphere in my pieces. After all, that’s usually half of what makes it horror to begin with! Besides even kids know when they should keep their voices down after all.
Glad you liked it!
Really really interesting six. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as “too dark” in YA nowadays. There is such a wide variety in YA right now! And I’m very interested to know exactly what these two found!!
Amy Durham
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I’ve been looking into it more lately and apparently YA is a much darker field than I thought, so I guess my novel isn’t too far off the mark.
These two just discovered the tip of the iceberg unfortunately, and it’s all downhill from there. 😉