123 Meme

From Jade Park who got this from Loud Solitude, who got this from Ed Champion:

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

So, from page 123 of my novel “in progress”:

Never. They asked him a few other things that nobody heard. Even upside down, he curved his back in a defiant squiggle that was unacceptable to the captors. One of the men, pulled out a large laquered board and motioned for Petros to come and look. No, Petros, don’t. His mother called from inside the house. He didn’t listen. He walked, one foot at a time to the front of the house. This was a tiny village, people did not live inside with shut windows and doors, they lived out in the plateia, in the courtyards around their house, in the tables that they placed outside in the summertime. His children could do nothing but watch and I suppose the communists wanted it that way. So that everyone could see exactly how if you refused to support the party, you were beaten in front of your children.

OK…well that’s from page 123 of the rough draft of the manuscript. It’s so rough and not in any order. I will also give you from page 23 of my thesis:

After a few minutes, before even knowing each other’s names we had already made up a mean song about Miss Blanca and we danced around the little pebble courtyard where we weren’t allowed to go. As we stepped on the stepping-stones in between the little garden of pansies and marigolds, Miss Blanca came out of her office with the old broom and shook it at us. “Watch out, Penny, she’s a witch,” said Dolores. “And these are graves,” she said, an air of ghost-like seriousness fluttered around her when the fog rolled in. Dolores pointed seriously at the granite plaque that was in the ground that said, in honor of Father O’Leary on it. “Don’t step on it. It’s bad luck.”

so strange–this meme.

If your reading this and you have a manuscript, consider yourself tagged. In other words, you gotta do it now on your blog.