Happy Wednesday.
Minterview - Mini Interview with Kathryn Mackel (feel free to use my clever word melding)
Kathy writes suspense/thrillers/sci-fi/fantasy. Her newest is The Hidden.
She played along and finished a story starter - see below.
My instructions were to build on the red italicized line with a couple of lines of her own.
She suggested I might be crazy, limiting a novelist to a few lines. Told me I was lucky I didn't get 40,000 words. The bold blue are all hers.
Hmmm. She also mentioned recovering from surgery. I suggested that the pain relievers might be hallucinogenic. Thanks for playing Kathy.
Check out The Hidden which I haven't read - yet. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1595540377
But my review for the first book in her Outriders series is here.
http://novelreviews.blogspot.com/2006/02/kathy-mackels-outridersreviewed.html
Lauren stared at the clock. Eleven forty-five, if only it read ten forty-five. Everyone should be allowed one do-over hour in life.
“Do you really believe that?”
“Huh?” Lauren’s attention jerked to the tinny voice snaking up from her feet.
“You heard me.” A tiny man in top hat and black tie stared up at her from the bottom of the wastebasket.
Lauren resisted the impulse to jam a phonebook into her trash, and thus obliterate what had to be the corniest hallucination in history. “Who’re you?”
“Wrong question.”
She couldn’t even get her own phantasms right. “What’s the right question?”
The tiny man buffed his fingernails with a file the size of a pin. Someone so miniscule had no right to play hard-to-get. He took off his top hat, bowing with a strange grace. “In regard to the do-over?”
Maybe Lauren should just go to the ladies room and try flushing the last hour away.
Instead she leaned closer, swallowing back the notion that she was about to pull an Alice and plunge down a rabbit hole. With her luck, it’d be filled with snakes, spiders, and sad-eyed clowns.
“What about it?” she said, not displeased by her snappish tone.
“The correct question is—were you able to have a do-over…” The tiny man grinned, showing oversized eyeteeth imbedded with diamonds.
Lauren reached for the phonebook. She killed houseflies for less.
The tiny man straightened his lapels with a loud sniff. “The correct question in regard to the do-over is: what would it cost me?”
Lauren leaned back in her chair, trying to mask the pounding of her heart by bouncing on her fanny. “If I were interested in a re-do…and I’m not saying I am…but if I were.” She tried to stop her question but her throat was too clenched to swallow it back.
“What would it cost me?” Lauren winced at her own pathetic eagerness.
Suddenly he was in her face, still tiny yet impossibly overwhelming. Poised for this heroic moment of decision and destiny, in which he whispered.,..
“Only that which you have no use for anyway.”
