777 Challenge - Page 7, Line 7, 7 Sentences of your WIP

I was tagged by Natasha Duncan-Drake for the 777 challenge, so here I go :).

777 Challenge

Page 7, Line 7, 7 Sentences

The 777 challenge requires you go to Page 7 of your work-in-progress, scroll down to Line 7 and share the next 7 sentences in a blog post. Once you have done this, you can tag 7 other bloggers to do the same with their work-in-progress. (see further down for those tagged), so here I go :).

So, my WIP is called, Witch Blood. It's the second in The Night Blood Chronicles:,
When coming of age means a taste for blood. Tom Franklin is haunted by his dreams, nightmarish images of dark places and even darker instincts. Learning they are repressed memories from his early childhood, Tom must face the heritage from his birth-father, a savage vampire known only as Raxos.

Page 7 of my word document takes the reader into Tom's memories of when he was with his father as a small child. The first book, Night Blood, dealt with revelations and extremes of emotions, but in Witch Blood, Tom is beginning to explore what his father's heritage means to him, and that involves remembering what it meant when he was a child.

He [Tom] wobbled a bit, because everything was blurry and he kept thinking about the taste of the blood in his mouth. It was gone now, clean like his face and hands, that Papa had wiped, but he was still tingling with the excitement of chasing the rabbit and he kept remembering the bite. It took him a moment to realise they had stopped and he just stood there when Papa crouched down to his level. Papa smiled at him. Tommy blinked back.

[You did well tonight, Tommy], Papa praised and he felt pride that was not his own slip into the back of his thoughts.

The happy feeling slowly made Tommy smile too, but it was one of those funny times when he knew it wasn't all him...

 Thanks for reading, I hope this excerpt piqued your interest.

So, now I am tagging these wonderful writers:

• Drae Box
• Laura Clipson
• Patricia Lynne
• Sara C Snider
• Nick Wilford
• Jolie Du Pre
• Jack Gilbert

Good luck to you all! :D

Book Review: The Haunting of Highdown Hall by Shani Struthers

A slow starter, this book grew on me.

The Haunting of Highdown Hall by Shani Struthers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this story, and since it's set in Sussex, the county right next door to my own, I enjoyed the localness of it all as well. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is that it deviates into explanations quite a lot: there's far too much of the author telling me what she knows about the local area and not just what, as the reader, I need to know.

The book starts well - a flashback to Christmas Eve 1958 and an English movie star, Cynthia Hart, celebrating her 31st birthday. She's a diva, she's a flirt, she drives men wild - and she dies that night of a heart attack. However, when we arrive back in the 21st Century, the first few pages dive into a totally unnecessary background information dump that could have been achieved in the first scene with the modern-day characters, Ruby Davis and her band of psychics.

Despite this detour, the start had intrigued me enough that I kept reading, and, gradually Ruby began to grow on me. This is a book that sounds written from the heart. Shani wants to tell me everything about Lewes that both she and Ruby clearly adore - it's just that most of the time I didn't need to know all that detail and I did end up skipping whole paragraphs that I began to recognise as the 'local colour' ones.

I actually ended up really enjoying this story. The characters are interesting and convincing, the plot, which is concerned with finding out why Cynthia is still in the manor she called home, had some twists that kept me reading, and I read the whole second half of the book in one sitting. I liked it enough to go and buy the second book in the series.

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