Teaser Tuesday!

I haven't done one of these in a while, so I figured I'd remedy that. This little, unedited excerpt is from a manuscript called BREAKING SKIN, which is not YA (shocking) and is so weird that I don't know whether I'll ever be able to do anything with it.

I have never been as aware of the sky as I was in Devlin. Of its sheer size and might, its ability to put a roof over the entire world. When I was a child, it inspired so much awe in me that I used to sit out on the back deck, with a mug of cocoa warming my fingers, and our old mutt Rusty warming my feet, humming beneath my breath, staring at the sky.

I never read constellations, or tried to chart the future. I didn’t need to, because at night in Devlin the stars poured across the sky thicker than whipped cream across a pavlova, and you felt that just watching them, just holding them in your line of vision, a little piece of magic might find its hideaway inside you. It’s one of the things I miss most about Devlin, the ache that the sky, the landscape, could put in you.

It’s different, here in Melbourne, the sky -- some of its grandeur is lost. Especially at night when the stars are few and far between, scattered pinpricks of light, easily outshone by car tail-lights.