Random Rita ~ Wednesday WIP Attack

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Evenin’, ladies!

Now, don’t faint…I did promise more frequent posts, didn’t I?

Anyone who knows me knows of my addiction to WIPs! From the veteran authors we know always deliver a completed fic to newbie authors we MUST nurture and encourage along their journey, especially in the beginnin’, the lure of a new storyline is simply irrestible!

Therefore, I’m dedicatin’ this post to just a few of the many wonderful WIPs I’m currently enjoyin’ and hope you enjoy them, too!

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13180700/1/Fated

Bella is a college student, Edward a cop that works with the world’s most dangerous, supernatural criminals. He is much more than just a vampire. He is one of the world’s oldest and deadliest creatures! There is something about Bella that seems to attract these creatures to her. Edward’s backstory and ancestry bring this story to life with a unique twist that brings lots of action.

Rated: Fiction M – English – Supernatural/Romance – Bella, Charlie S., Edward, Jacob – Chapters: 4 – Words: 19,750 – Reviews: 75 – Favs: 108 – Follows: 197 – Updated: 11h ago – Published: Jan 17 – id: 13180700

Bella’s roommate, Patty, has set her up on a disastrous blind date culminating in the strangest night of her life…well, so far *wink!*

As I walk out the restaurant’s main doors onto the sidewalk, I dial Patty’s cell number. It goes straight to voicemail. Patty borrowed my car and promised to pick me up when I call. Now I realize it was a ploy to get me to stay through the entire date and have to get a ride home with Craig. I defiantly decide to walk home. If my calculations are correct, it should only be about seven blocks.

I make a left and continue walking, retrying Patty’s cell. I stop at the corner of Main Street and Chestnut Street and look around, judging my approximate direction in relation to my apartment. A left onto Chestnut is my decision. I walk two blocks and then make a right down an alley.

Either side of the narrow alley is lined with tall, old, brick buildings, several stories high. Old, rusty, metal fire escapes hang from the brick walls and large metal trash dumpsters are placed on either end of the alley. They give the alley the smell of sun-ripened vomit. The only sounds in the alley are the sound of my heeled shoes crunching against loose stones, and the slow drips of rainwater, from a previous storm, coming off of the fire escapes and dripping down onto the stones forming tiny puddles.

As I continue walking my heels keep twisting my ankles as I step on jagged stones. What I hear behind me sounds like an echo of my walking, but as I slow my pace down the echo sound does not slow. I stop walking and turn around to look behind me and find no one there. The sound stops also. “That’s strange” I mutter to myself.

To save my ankles from getting sprained I remove my shoes and carry them in my left hand. I continue walking, dodging small puddles on my way. The echo sound starts up again but I notice it still sounds like a pair of shoes crunching on the gravel behind me. I am now in my bare feet and am not making any noise to be able to produce an echo. After listening to the echo for several seconds as I walk, once again I turn around and find no one behind me. The sound stops as I do.

I pause a moment to look for a logical explanation for what I am hearing. As I am looking around the alley, I notice a shadow of a person slowly floating down the brick building ahead of me, to my left. In stunned silence, I watch the shadow float down to the ground. “People don’t just float down from the sky”, I tell myself. I take a moment to reason this out in my head. The sun is at my back, so the shadow must be caused by something or someone behind me. As I come to this realization, fear strikes me leaving me frozen in place, too afraid to look behind me.

Another shadow now appears in front of me on the same building. This one is on the ground running way too fast to be human, from right to left. It looks like the second shadow tackles the first one. A loud crack and the sound of something crumbling comes from behind me. I take a deep breath, gathering my courage and turn my head to look behind me. No one is there.

On the wall of the building behind me, to my left, there is a dent in the bricks a couple feet wide and long. The dent in the area of bricks contains a large scorch mark. I walk up to it and run my fingertips across the crumbling bricks. I quickly pull my hand back from the heat. I glance around at my surroundings nervously and peek up into the sky, not sure what I am expecting to see. Nothing unusual is in sight. Letting out a sigh of relief, I curse Patty for not answering her phone, and begin to sprint out of the alley.

This is the author’s first fic so it’s very important to leave her some love! (I call it primin’ the pump LOL!)

~oOo~https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13165822/1/Vacation-Town

Reeling and traumatized from the death of her father and her subsequent move across the country, Bella finds herself in a popular vacation spot-in the off season. Here, she meets Edward, a boy dealing with his own ghosts, who she can’t help feel drawn to. Their tentative relationship grows as they learn to face their fears and learn that things might not be hopeless after all.

Rated: Fiction T – English – Romance/Hurt/Comfort – Bella, Edward – Chapters: 9 – Words: 16,963 – Reviews: 329 – Favs: 133 – Follows: 255 – Updated: Feb 12 – Published: Jan 2 – id: 13165822

She just turned seventeen but she feels like she’s already lived a lifetime-and-a-half.

Trauma does that to you, apparently.

Trauma also thrusts you into flashbacks when you hear a car horn nearby from a silver SUV pulling up to the curb. The phantom sound of crunching metal rings in her ears as Renee makes her way around the front of the car, her smile huge.

She hugs her and Bella winces as Renee’s arm squeezes her bruised rib, but her mother doesn’t notice. She holds on for too long and only lets go when Bella tries to shrug her off of herself. Renee frowns as she pulls away, surveying the stitches on her daughter’s face.

“Did they say if those are supposed to scar?”

Bella looks away, bile rising in her throat. That’s her biggest concern right now? She hasn’t seen her in nearly three years and her entire life was just thrown up in the air and instead of helping to pick up the pieces, Renee is commenting on the mess.

The trip takes exactly thirty-four minutes and she doesn’t even realize when they cross over the bridge onto the island, her eyes squeezed shut so tightly that it hurts.

The hotel, Summer View Suites, is small compared to the chain  hotels they passed, but is larger than the houses around it. Wooden shingles are painted bright pink and the shutters around the wide windows are teal. It’s so bright it’s jarring. The parking lot is relatively small and there’s only three other cars in spaces, the building itself lifted above them on the familiar stilts that everything seems to sit on here.

She takes survey of her “room.” There’s a small armoire in the corner and a table and chair under a round window facing the beach. Above the sand dunes now, there isn’t anything to block the view. The green-blue water is calm, far as the eye can see. She feels nervousness clawing its way into her stomach. She’s going to need to get a curtain.

She tears herself away from the window, using her good arm to start to unpack her duffle. Since the weather is so different on the island, most of the clothes she had were useless. She donated them before she left, though she couldn’t dare part with the old sweaters her dad had, the ones he’d wear when he drank his coffee out on the back porch on Sunday mornings.

“This is my favorite kind of quiet,” he’d said once on a rare occasion she’d joined him. The sun hadn’t quite reached that side of the house and the shade left everything covered in frost.

Her dad always said that there were different kinds of silence. There was the back porch, wind-blowing-through-the-trees quiet. There was fishing-off-the-docks quiet. The bad kind of quiet, the kind when the squad would run into something heavy at work and no one quite knew what to say.

In her new room in South Carolina, only hearing the hum of the AC throughout the hotel, Bella finds a new kind of quiet.

A lonely kind.

You’ll be pleased to know the quiet doesn’t stay lonely once Edward takes her under his broken wing!

~oOo~(banner by Belizabetty)

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13199669/1/Heart-of-Stone

Struggling through tragedy and betrayal, Edward believes he’s living in a cold and loveless world with no choice but to harden his heart. He’s only living a numb half-life as his sole focus becomes revenge. If he forgets his true reason for living, is there anyone who can get through to him?

Rated: Fiction M – English – Angst/Hurt/Comfort – Edward – Chapters: 2 – Words: 4,684 – Reviews: 90 – Favs: 112 – Follows: 226 – Updated: 3h ago – Published: Feb 6 – id: 13199669

This story is full-blown angst on an angst train stopping at every angst station on the way to Angst Town.

Most of us are conditioned to live our lives as though we’ll be around until we’re grumbling over gray hairs. It doesn’t occur to the average person, untouched by the venomous hands of death, that this isn’t always the case. Some people die young; some younger than others.

We tend to take our days for granted, assuming nothing can touch us.

We slowly forget to say I love you every day, to never go to bed angry, or to hug our parents goodbye. We know that tomorrow is going to show with the sun, no questions asked. We become complacent.

We’re idiots, basically.

But when that tragedy hits close to one of us, then we suddenly understand the truth. It’s an ugly truth, but the bottom line is, we should treat every day as our last. We should take that leap, do that one thing that scares us a little. We should say the words in our hearts, and we should remember to call our parents and grandparents more often. We should have life insurance, and living wills, and burial plots.

Even with those basic preparations in place, nobody wants to think about their own death, and that included him. We should realize that we begin our journey to death the day we are born. No one knows when or why, just that everyone dies.

And when death came for him with its greedy touch, it came with a screech and a yank. It came with twisted metal and broken glass. It came with blood rushing out quicker than it could be staunched. It came on a harsh cry and a broken sob. It came with her begging him to save her, and him unable to do anything but kneel in the jagged shards of what was left of his heart and beg for their Lord to take him instead. It wasn’t quick or merciless, but agonizingly painful. He saw their promised forever slipping through his fingers faster than the blood she was losing. He thought of their little girl, who would grow up without a mother, left only with the man who’d let her mother die.

And, if you think losin’ his wife is the worst thing that ever happens to Edward, you’d be dead wrong!

~oOo~(banner by Lolypop82)

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13179486/1/Break

“Be careful what you do to a good woman because when it’s all said and done, everyone will have to deal with the bitch you created.” – Author unknown. E&B.

Rated: Fiction M – English – Drama/Hurt/Comfort – Chapters: 7 – Words: 38,370 – Reviews: 1,469 – Favs: 622 – Follows: 933 – Updated: 20h ago – Published: Jan 15 – id: 13179486

For consistently mind blowin’, well written stories, you can’t do much better (if at all) than PattyRose!

One year after catchin’ her husband cheatin’ on her with her best friend, Bella opens up to a perfect stranger in a coffee shop.

“I have a love/hate relationship with windows. On the one hand, there’s so much to see through them. On the other hand. . . what is it about them that makes people feel safe?”

“Do you mean physically safe?” the stranger asked, his eyes still on the aforementioned window.

“No. Yes. What I mean is, people seem to think they can do the craziest things as long as there’s a window in front of them.”

“I suppose. . . there’s a false sense of privacy when you’re behind a window.”

“Yes. Take for example that man fixing his hair in his reflection and looking right through us as if we’re not even here.”

In my periphery, I saw the stranger nod. “Or that kid who’s got his ass pressed right up against my face.”

An involuntary chuckle escaped me. But then, I stopped.

“Windows tend to distract me and get me into trouble; so I really should end my love/hate relationship with them. There really isn’t much to see anyway, is there? Just people scurrying back and forth, either completely aware they’re on display or totally oblivious to the fact that their every move is being scrutinized.”

When the stranger didn’t immediately reply, I assumed my comment taught him the dangers of speaking with an unknown person.

“So. . . you don’t believe there’s anything in between?”

“Nope. People are either complete assholes or complete idiots.” I stood up. “Enjoy your coffee.”

A slightly humorous but pessimistic observation that makes Bella seem somewhat sane. But don’t let looks deceive you LOL!

Hmmm, I’m sensin’ a sinister fic theme developin’ here! Oh, well…it floats my boat LOL!

Happy Wednesday, y’all!

Rita