Teaser Tuesday

So, the other weird thing about Mutants.... (see previous post) is that it's got epistolary sections in between chapters. For those not familiar with that word it's things like letters, diary entries, IM conversations instead of narrative prose. Mutant has everything from IM conversations to recipes to horoscopes to newspaper articles to excerpts from Hallie's school reports to emails in between each chapter. It's great fun that way. I think that's one of the things that Mutants currently has "going" for it in originality.

(BTW, one of my favorite books of all time that does this is Boy Next Door by Meg Cabot... and the whole book is written in that method, but other books do it and do it well. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is another one. In YA books, I have a book called Sorcery and Cecilia in my TBR pile that is laid out in epistolary fashion, and my BFF loved that book.)

So, anyway, I figured I'd throw one of these in-between sections from Mutants here so you can see what I'm working on.

Lucas’s Notes (five months previously):

April 5

Couldn’t sleep last night, I kept waking up. I felt slightly fevery—though testing my temperature didn’t seem to bear out that hypothesis. After the third time, I got up and drew blood. It’s useful being ambidextrous. It makes it much easier to draw blood. I can’t imagine what it’s like for those that aren’t. My blood levels are normal. Everything seems to be normal. My temperature is 99.8 which is normal for us. I might try to increase my E-coli levels. Perhaps it’s something to do with puberty. The male body does go through changes of all kinds and reaches its sexual prime in one’s late teens.

Earlier today, I read an article about the copulation of Australian redback spiders. Male spiders will go without food or drink while in search of a female to mate with. Eventually, they’ll die of starvation or desiccation if they don’t find one. Of course, most females eat their partner after mating anyway, though. I’m speaking of these specific arachnids, of course. Though, sadly, the same seems to be true of my mother.