Devon and Sunny - Excerpt II

Cracking on with my editing and I've now gotten back the first third of my manuscript back from one of my editing volunteers. I have yet to go through her notes and see what she's done. To be honest I figure it's best to leave it until I've finished my own edit all the way through before I start looking at her contribution. It's a good motivator though because the more I finish the more I can send her way and the more I get back the more I want to finish my part so I can see how it was received.

See the clever circle I've created?

So here for your reading pleasure is another excerpt from it. At the moment my working title is Devon & Sunny. This is a working title in every sense as I really have no intention of leaving it as that. I'm open to suggestions or ideas for titles so if this excerpt gives you an idea please do share by posting a comment.

...

Devon and Sunny - Working title

...

On Monday morning Sunny slid into her seat in homeroom early, turned to Devon and asked, “Why do you hate me?”

The classroom was empty except for the two of them. Devon always came in early to work on homework. He could never get anything done at home anymore. It was too loud. Things with his dad were getting worse.

“Huh?” Devon looked at Sunny blankly. He was really tired and had a lot of work to do. He didn’t have time for Sunny, who had been dubbed The Weird Witch by everyone else in the eighth grade. If she was the Weird Witch and he spent too much time with her he’d become the Total Loser Toto or worse, Dorothy Devon.

Sunny was on a mission though. She was fed up with Devon’s attempts to thwart her. Moving to Calgary had been a chance to reinvent herself and reinvent herself she would. She was going to be assertive and not take crap from anyone, especially some shy kid who obviously could use a friend as badly as her.

“Why..do..you..hate..me?” she spoke clearly, enunciating each word perfectly.

“I never said I did,” Devon looked away, unable to handle the way she tried to hold his eye contact.

“And you haven’t said you don’t. You act like a totally jerk.” Sunny pressed on.

“I’m not jerk!” said Devon with far more confidence than he felt, “I’m a loner.”

“Even loners need friends. Why are you so uninterested in being with people? You never talk to anyone. I’ve been trying to be your friend and the effort has been killing me,” despite her bravado, Sunny was actually quite afraid this might not work and she would lose her only chance of making a friend in this school.

“Well, maybe I just don’t want friends,” Devon felt how weak his argument was.

“Well that’s just great. Now I have no one to give this invitation to,” Sunny flashed the white envelope, her secret weapon and the thing she hoped would bait him.

“Invitation? For what?” Devon asked, unable to hide the curiousity from his voice.

“Nothing, it’s for a friend,” Sunny slid the envelope across her desk so Devon had to crane his neck to see it.

“But… you don’t have any friends, you said…”

Sunny blinked slowly, daring him to finish his sentence. Then she arched her pierced eyebrow and looked away.

“Oh,” Devon remained still. Then he looked away too and slowly the other students began to arrive and Mrs. Hoober came in and then Sunny slipped the envelope into her bag as she pulled out her binder and Devon couldn’t ask about it anymore.

...

The contents of this blog and all of it's creativity are copyright and property of Kaitlyn S. C. Hatch

Devon and Sunny - Excerpt

I'm in the process of editing this myself and also having it edited by two other people. I have to say, any fears I had around editing are long gone. I look forward to it, finding the re-writing simple, the purging and cutting back liberating and the ability to try something different rewarding. It helps that this particular novel has gone untouched for years. I originally finished it in about 2000 I think. Since then I've hardly ever gone back to look at it.

I love picking up a piece of my writing from so many years ago. I can see where I've grown, how my abilities have improved and my style has shifted. I can see where I still can do some work but where I'm quite capable.

But now I'm rambling. So here it is, for your reading pleasure - and mind that this is still being edited actively so any comments, tips, advice, or criticisms are appreciated!

...

Devon and Sunny - Working Title

...

“So,” said Sunny’s mum, Catherine Clarkson, “it’s your birthday next month!”

“Yeah,” Sunny said absentmindedly as she drew her comic on the kitchen table. Her mother was often too bubbly, like she was trying desperately to be a cool mum. Sunny shaded in the nose of her monkey hero, hoping her lack of enthusiasm would be conveyed by her obvious interest in something else. The comic was of her own creation, with the help of her best friend, Caley. It was called Gay Monkeys From Mars. Mostly she just liked drawing monkeys with pink and rainbow capes. They all had little antennae growing out of their heads, so you knew they were martians. There were six of them, each with a nose a different colour of the pride rainbow. Caley had come up with the red, yellow and orange monkeys, Sunny with the green, blue and purple ones. They didn’t have a leader but the purple nosed one was particularly bossy. This was the one Sunny currently worked on.

“So, who are you inviting?” enquired Catherine. Catherine worried about her daughter. She seemed to be turning into an archetypal angst-ridden teenager. This didn’t bode well with Catherine, whose primary reason for not wanting children was that she might end up with a girl and she didn’t think she could handle raising a girl. Sunny had been a delightful surprise though, more interested in G.I Joe than Barbie, preferring CDs over the current fashion and riding her bike to putting on make-up. Lately, however, since moving to this city, Sunny had begun to act differently. Catherine felt guilty, assuming that the move was more upsetting for her daughter than Sunny was willing to admit. She’d tried broaching the subject a few times and had been met with an icy glare.

“I dunno,” mumbled Sunny, who wasn’t at all upset by the move. Yes, she certainly missed Caley, but they’d been keeping in touch with regular emails. Sunny was just so happy to be far away from her old life. She could reinvent herself here, be a different person, someone who was mysterious and quirky. Someone about whom her classmates knew nothing about. Someone who wasn’t the school joke.

“How about Derek?”

“Devon,” corrected Sunny. Catherine chewed her bottom lip, a habit she had when she’d said the wrong thing. Sunny didn’t notice as she kept drawing, “And I doubt he’ll want to come, we don’t know each other very well and he’s really quiet and stuff. I don’t think he likes me.”

“You’ve been talking about him the entire two weeks you’ve been there! How can you not know each other very well?” exclaimed Catherine, exasperatedly, “And he seems like the only person who does talk to you in that horrible school, I’m sure he likes you.”

Sunny looked up at her mum to see if she was serious. Catherine’s arms were crossed, her eyes wide and eyebrows arched high. Sunny doubted her mum would be convinced, “He’s just not very interested is all.”

“It could be a way to become better friends,” since Sunny was little she and Caley had been nearly inseparable. Catherine knew the importance of having a close girlfriend in which to confide and find support. If not for the girlfriends she had she probably wouldn’t have managed when Sunny’s dad left them when Sunny was only three, or when Catherine’s position in a small law firm had been made redundant, or when her car was stolen and it took four months for her to get a replacement. A new school was an equivalent crisis for a teenager, as far as Catherine was concerned. Never mind being in a new city on top of that.

If her daughter could only make a friend, someone in which she could confide or go to for comfort and support, she felt that Sunny would be O.K.

“Whatever,” Sunny sighed. She began to put away her drawing stuff, stacking the paper neatly, placing her pencils into their case, wiping eraser bits off the table onto the floor.

“I’ll make an invite for him O.K.?” offered Catherine.

“Fine,” Sunny gathered her things to take upstairs to her room in the attic.

...

The contents of this blog and all its creativity are copyright and property of Kaitlyn S. C. Hatch