Hey everyone!  It’s getting close to the holidays, so it’s been busy for all of us I’m sure.

Anyway, in the midst of all the Christmas shopping and other festivities, I thought it would be fun to share a tiny excerpt from my book, Standing By.  I was recently flipping through the pages of the book and came across a scene from about mid-book that I love, and I loved writing.  It’s obviously not the full scene, but a snippet of it.

“Guess you’re not good at all sports, huh Williams?”

    You have got to be kidding me.

    I spun on my heel and saw Eric leaning against the bench behind where Cody sat. His eyes remained focused on me. A few feet behind him stood Rachel, who gave me a weak smile. Cody followed my gaze, turning in his seat to look at the newcomers. He gave them a small wave.

    “Hey y’all,” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

    “Oh, we were just in the neighborhood,” Eric said, tearing his eyes away from me and strolling over to the ball return. He picked up a ball and rotated it in his hands, testing its weight. “Hmm, sixteen pounds.” He looked over his shoulder at Cody.  “This yours?”

    “Yeah, my name’s even on the side of it,” Cody said.

    Eric turned the ball over. “So it is.” He placed the ball down and went back over toward the bench. His eyes darted between the two of us. “You kids having fun?”

    I was going to kill him.

    Our white flag had gone up into flames when Eric found out that I was going on a date with Cody. I’ll admit that the crumbling of our budding friendship was my fault, but Eric wasn’t completely innocent either. During study hall that day he refused to give me a real reason as to why he didn’t want me to go out with Cody, other than just not liking him. That wasn’t good enough for me, so after our last class I found Cody halfway to my locker and told him I’d like to go on a date with him.

    Eric hadn’t uttered one word to me all week.

    And now he shows up in the middle of my date?

– excerpt from Standing By, pg. 106

What I love about this scene is how passive Eric seems when talking to Julie (the narrator of this chapter) and Cody.  He really surprised me a lot while writing this book and was definitely one of my favorite characters to write.  I mean, all of them were, but there was just something about Eric’s side of this story that really made it a great experience to write.

Standing By is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle!