I was recently tagged by Antoine Vanner on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/antoine.vanner/posts/313715308791977) in an ongoing blog series called “Game of Seven“. The rules are that you turn to page 7 or 77 of your current work in progress, count down 7 lines, then post the next 7 sentences, interpreting the last two instructions a bit liberally so that the whole thing makes sense.

First off, the extract. A brother and sister who have escaped the fall of Ugarit and have fled to the south are talking, while trying to decide on a course of action:

He waited, watching the dappled light and shade play across her face. She continued.

“I miss the sun rising over the hills ahead of us, and setting into the open sea behind. I miss our house, and our garden. I miss our mother and father terribly. I miss the singing from the temples and the ceremony of the royal processions. I miss the ships coming in to the docks, and the endless flocks of wading birds around the bay to the north. I even miss the fish we used to eat four days out of five, and I never thought I would say that.”

Now, whoever made up the rules for this blog hop obviously works in a word processor (which has paged output) rather than straight to Kindle as I do (which is a continuous stream like a web page). So for me, trying to work out where on earth page 77 might be was something of a guess, not to mention the fact that the sequence will almost certainly be chopped and changed before release. But it’s a nice piece of fun and one that I am very happy to have joined in. The above is an educated guess where the extract might live.

Going forward, I asked Teresa Thomlinson (http://www.theresatomlinson.com/authors_blog.html) if she was happy to be tagged next, so look out for her contribution. I have emailed a couple of other people and am waiting to see if they want to join in as well. Links will get posted when available.