The First Tidbit Tuesday!

My youngest child, Jimmy, has the swine flu. How not wonderful life can be. I spent the majority of the day at the doctor's office and the pharmacy trying to get him all squared away and am just getting a chance to sit down at the computer and blog. He's only five so he's very needy when he's sick and wants lots of attention. Right now he's relaxing on the recliner in the living room watching Phineas and Ferb on Disney.

From all the media coverage of the swine flu you would think it was some big scary awful thing, but our doctor said it's just another flu and so long as Jimmy doesn't come down with any symptoms of pneumonia, he will be fine within a week. She told me that the reason people are getting so sick and some people are dying with the swine flu has more to do with the pneumonia than the swine flu.

So, in other news... today is going to be the first in a series of "Tidbit Tuesdays". On Tuesdays I'm going to release a small excerpt from something I'm currently working on, either The Council or Train Wrecks to give you a sneak preview of stuff. These excerpts will maybe be only a paragraph or so, just a taste of what I'm working on. I'd appreciate feedback after you read it each week and tell me what you think. Let me remind you that these excerpts will be from rough drafts of works in progress, not finished works. They may have errors in them and/or in the finished product they may be changed. I will be adding the tidbit at the end of the blog posting for the day.

The music of the moment today is Sara Bareilles "Bottle It Up". I love her bluesy sounding voice. She has a great voice and a unique sound in her music. If you are looking for a new CD to purchase, I recommend her "Little Voice" album. I don't often buy CDs, but I couldn't resist getting hers quite a while back when her song "Love Song" came out and I heard it on the NBC show Lipstick Jungle. (A total pity it was canceled, I loved that show, but I'm a fan of Candace Bushnell's work.)

The Tuesday Tidbit is the opening paragraph from The Council. There's not much I can say to introduce this tidbit excerpt, it's pretty self-explanatory as a first paragraph of a novel.

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It was cold. Not just cold, it was downright freezing outside, and the chill lingered in the air of my bedroom. I could hear the pelting of sleet on the windows of my room. Nothing about it made me desire to get out of my cozy bed on that Saturday morning and put my feet to the hardwood floor I knew would feel as though it had been refrigerated overnight. It was one of those weekends I regretted having to get up for my training. It was often harder than soccer practice with SAQS. Who knew that having such special abilities as mine required training to perfect? Couldn’t I just have naturally grown into them like Evander and most others of our kind?