I went to sleep. I did….

I went to sleep. I did. To bed, at any rate. And found myself restless. Thinking about the novel, though I promised myself I would finish the other book first. I know the plot, but there are questions of structure. Time jumps, but not too many. Controlled release of information. Build-up of reader tension. Foreshadowing what is to come in the first lines, the first paragraph. Finally I had to get up and grab the computer and write a little of it down. Just thoughts, a stab at something that will no doubt change a hundred hundred times between now and publication. But here...a start to the new novel.


Part One: How It Started

When it was finally ending, when her glass house was crashing down around her -- and who could name the one who had cast the first stone? -- Shefali found herself obsessed with beginnings. With the question of how it had started, how she had done this to herself, to them. She had no doubt that she had, in fact, been directly responsible -- she had proposed their arrangement. She had pushed the three of them forward, through every strange and crucial juncture. Though now her mother, her sisters, urged her to blame one or the other of the boys, Shefali knew better. She could take it all on herself, she could bear whatever needed to be borne, if only she knew where it all had started. How far back did she need to go?


Okay, brain. Now, can I sleep?

4 thoughts on “I went to sleep. I did….”

  1. Shoot, does it have to have an unhappy ending?

    Can’t we have a happy-ending threesome novel?

    Hmm, it would be cool, though, if the beginning was deceptive, and it turned out it actually WAS a happy ending, despite the dour tone here…??

    I probably shouldnt mess with your creative vibe, but thats what you get for posting bits on your blog… I would never do that! (shudder) 🙂

  2. Benjamin… maybe she’s faking us out. Maybe that’s not the real ending. Or maybe it looks to the character that it’s that way, but it turns out to not really be that way. Or…

    OK, so I want a happy ending too. 🙂

    No, seriously, MA this is great. Very intriguing, very “must read more”-ish.

    I’m really looking forward to this novel, for a lot of reasons.

    And I think it’s *great* you’re posting here.

    (She said with a distinct “teacher’s pet” smirk at Benjamin)

  3. I post snippets of work-in-progress to my blog, too, but I’m very clear that they are not cast in stone, and may never appear in the actual story. (I also don’t have a comments form on my blog, so I don’t get a whole lot of responses. Perhaps that helps it feel less like I’m submitting unfinished work to be critiqued.)

  4. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    It’s tricky. Because while I do want to mess around with (and use) reader expectations, I don’t want to completely turn off those readers who hope for happy endings right away. (If you’re going to make it a tragedy, it’s much better to string them along for a good long while first. 🙂

    Will poke at the problem some more…

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