Two days ago, I powered through the remaining six chapters and finished changing the point-of-view in A Boat Made of Bone from 1st person to 3rd. It only took me six hours!
And today I STILL have a backache from looking down at my laptop. But I’m through the worst part of editing! I can’t even explain what a relief it is to not have to feel like the worst is yet to come regarding editing. I’ve learned my lesson. I will never, ever change the point -of-view of a book after writing sixty thousand words of it in one point-of-view. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I’m putting up another teaser.
Surprise! This is a teaser that features Kate’s real-life love-interest, Ty Watts. Enjoy! 
Ty followed Kate, carrying her guitar case slung over his shoulder. “Wait for a second, Kate. Let’s trade,” he suggested, stopping and slipping the case off to hand to her.
“Fine with me.” She let him take the amp, noticing his muscles flex with the weight of it. She averted her gaze, wondering if that was part of his plan—to entice her with his muscular plumage. Peacocking. He had to be peacocking. Kate put on the back-pack style case.
“I need the workout,” he explained, his dark shirt tight around his arms. They resumed the walk up the street to Kate’s house.
“In that case, give it back. I need the workout ten times more than you.” Let’s see how determined he is to carry it, she thought wryly.
“Sorry, no dice. In this relationship, I’m the pack-mule,” he said, miming a driver flicking a whip.
“That’s not exactly the animal I’d choose for you.”
“What would you pick? A stallion? A stallion, right?”
“Well, I guess that remains to be seen,” Kate responded with a coy smile. Her flirtatious tone caught her off guard and she kept her face turned away.
Ty laughed. She glanced at him from the corner of her eye as they stopped at the intersection, waiting for the traffic light to change. Beneath the streetlights, Kate saw his cheeks redden. Hmmm.
“I was talking about whether or not you can carry that amp all the way to my house without complaint, not—whatever you were thinking,” she lied, trying to sound casual.
“Are you telling me you can read my thoughts?” he asked, shifting the amp to his other hand. The disbelief and teasing tone in his voice were unmistakeable. The traffic light changed and they headed across. Tendrils of heat curled up from the pavement, swirling around Kate’s bare legs.
“Would you still hang out with me if I said yes?”
They continued up the northbound street, passing the soup place and the Scientology building. Trees lined the sidewalk and the shadows deepened beneath each tree where they were shielded from the yellow light of the street lamps.
“Foul,” he said, laughing. “There’s no way I can answer that and still be cool. If I say no, then you’ll suspect me of having bad motives or being unfaithful in thought. If I say yes, you’ll think I must be the dullest guy you’ve ever met, intellectually speaking.”
“So you’re worried I can actually read your thoughts?” A group of bike enthusiasts passed them, some of them riding extremely modified machines—one had a seat-post and steering column that were almost ten feet tall.
“Whoa, did you see that?” Ty asked, stopping and turning around to watch the group recede down the street.
“Yeah, I think a bunch of them live up the street from me. Weirdos,” Kate said, shaking her head.
“You think so?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe? I just don’t see the point in some of their bike modifications.”
“Fun? Just because they can?” Ty speculated as they continued up the street.
“Probably. I just don’t get it,” Kate said, waving a dismissive hand.
“So you’d never make a bike like that?” he asked, pointing the direction they went. He switched the amp to his other hand.
Kate pretended to think about it. “Um, no.”
“Not the adventurous type, eh?”
“Just not adventurous with bikes.”
“Then what? What are you adventurous with?”
Kate could hear the grin in his voice and wondered if he was looking for something specific. She cleared her throat. “You know, the usual. Rock climbing, bouldering, that seems pretty adventurous, right? I like to hike. Uh, I’m not afraid to try new foods.” They crossed the final street before Kate’s flat. Plinking sounds came from the driveway of a nearby house where a man had his head beneath the hood of his car, tinkering. Muffled voices rose from a group of smokers out on a porch further up the street.
“And what adventurous foods have you tried?” Ty asked.
“Uh, let me think,” she said, suddenly unable to remember anything remotely interesting. “OK, yeah, squid. I tried squid once.”
“Right on! I love kalamari,” he said, sounding excited.
“No, not kalamari. It was literally just a plateful of tentacles. Like as though the tentacles were supposed to be spaghetti noodles. They were in a dish, some kind of nasty Korean dish.”
“So . . . you didn’t like it?”
“No, but that’s not the point, is it? I tried it. That’s the point,” she explained, suddenly concerned that he’d find her adventurous spirit wanting, just because she didn’t like squid.
“Hmm, I guess. The jury is still out on whether or not you’re adventurous enough.”
Kate glanced at him, feeling defensive, and caught the gleam in his eye as they climbed the stairs to her front porch, where light from the front room spilled out the picture window. “Gee, thanks,” she said. She was beginning to feel like any relationship with him was a lost cause. The defeatist side of her whispered that she should give up and let the seams burst that she’d stitched up around the lopsided parts of her personality. That was how she kept it all in. Kept it hidden. See if he likes me then, a voice in her head seemed to say.
Kate pulled the keys from her messenger bag and unlocked the door. Ty followed her inside where he set the amp down. He rubbed his fingers together, massaging them a bit.
“Well. I’m impressed and I guess you’re a stallion. You didn’t complain at all, well done,” Kate observed as she dropped her bag on the floor and slipped out of her backpack-style guitar case. She leaned it against the cinderblock and plywood bookcase. “Audra would have—“ she began, turning. Without warning, Ty took her in his arms, backed her against the wall and kissed her.
Wait, what? Kate’s thoughts scrambled to catch up. Ty’s lips tasted minty. His breath filled her as he moved in deeper. It happened so quickly that she was receptive just out of confusion, and, well, to be honest, it wasn’t like she didn’t want it to happen.
She wanted this, didn’t she?
One hand came to the side of her face, the other touched her waist, tentatively. Beneath the delectable flavor of him, there was a hint of chocolate, and then just that, that one taste—the one that flipped a switch in her, shut down reason and turned on desire.
His hips pressed into her, and she felt his knee curve around her thigh. A groan came growling up into her throat and she couldn’t hold it back.
If he didn’t stop soon, Kate was afraid she’d begin tearing his clothes off. She opened her eyes to see if he was showing any signs of letting up and was surprised by the half-lidded, gray-blue eyes staring at her. Huh, she thought drunkenly, I didn’t know he had gray-blue eyes. There was a soft tone in his expression and a powerful lust pulled at the edges of his expanding pupils.
She managed to sort through the hormones of desire coursing through her blood to discover her hands, folded against his chest, like she’d been tranquilized by his lips. Her fingers responded to her commands and moved slightly, and then she found the strength to push him away. Their mouths disconnected and his coarse fingers slid down her jaw, trailing along like lightning until they reached her chin and drifted away as gentle as an electrified summer breeze.
He tilted his forehead until it touched hers. The hand that just left her cheek came to rest like a sunbeam on her arm. “I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks now, Kate,” he said. He was so close to her. She still felt the length of his body pressed against hers. Every nerve ending was aflame. Her thighs tingled, her gut screamed, “Take me! Take me!”
And . . . all she could think about . . . was Will.
“Storms” by Exitmusic, from the album Passage