Excerpts

Sortitus, that was really good. I really want to read more. love-liv, as usual, that was really good. Caveats, it was a better fighting scene then I could ever write. I love the cliffy at the end. Who is she?

Here is the first little bit of mine:
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The walk home from school hadn’t changed much over the years. I had moved from the elementary school to the middle school and now the high school but the route was still same, I just walked a little further. No new buildings had gone up, but a few had been knocked down. Neighbors came and went, bringing with them a new porch swing, a front yard of grass, or a sidewalk strewn with bikes and scooters.
   The schools themselves had changed, too. About three-fourths of our administration only lasted a year. We got new teachers and old teachers alike by the handful, all thinking they could make a difference, motivate us and be part of some miracle story where one of us makes it into an Ivy League school and becomes the next rocket scientist. If you’ve ever gone to a school with a twenty percent graduation rate, you know as well as I do that one teacher won’t make much of a difference. If a teacher can somehow convince me to not ditch class on test day, they’ve performed a miracle in my book.
   Even my house hadn’t changed much. We were considered to be in the “nice” part of our neighborhood, but that isn’t saying much. Pretty much anything is nice compared to the bad part of New York. The once-white paint was still peeling and our yard was still dirt dotted with holes and piles, a result of my younger brother trying to amuse himself. The same, old, beat-up car was still parked in our garage.
   If you were somebody looking in on out neighborhood, you would think nothing had really changed. The place was still run down. It was still filled with poor people who didn’t have much chance in changing their life for the better. There were still drug dealers on every corner. A few different gangs still fought to rule the area. My life, though, was completely different.
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It's definitely not the best part of my novel, but nothing else would make much sense.