99th Page Challenge

Good morning, my blurking darlings. Today we have a slight departure from the norm. I've joined some fellow writers in the 99th Page Challenge. Oh, I can hear all of you now, complaining, "But, Empress, I haven't had time to enter your Sensible Reading Challenge, how can I face another? Dammit!"

Because this one is EASY. Easy-peasy, as the Brits say. This is based on the 99th page test (don't ask me, go over to the Fabulous Alicia's blog, A Slice of the Blog Pie, and read and follow. She's almost to 100 followers, and when she hits it, CONTEST TIME!).

When reading this page and all the others, you should focus and answer the following three questions:
1. Would you turn to page 100?
2. Why or why not?
3. Based on what you read, how likely would you buy the book?

All I'm allowed to tell you is the title and the genre (I HATE having to genre my book, but it's da rules, dammit...)
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One Flew Out of the Broom Closet
Paranormal

Hal just shook his head (he does that a lot around me); he’d told me that living in L.A. for a couple of years had given him a high weirdness tolerance—nothing could shock him anymore. “If I cross your palm with silver,would you read my cards?” he asked.

“No, but if you cross it with ten dollars, I’ll be happy to,” Ronnie beamed.

Hal laughed and pulled out his wallet and instead of a sawbuck, he laid a fifty on her. Then I remembered California community property laws; he must have done REALLY well from the divorce, especially if she still had the Beverly Hills property.

OK, I was far too cool and pure of soul to have thoughts THAT avaricious.

Ronnie looked at Hal speculatively and motioned him into the tent. I toasted him with my tea cup and waved him in. She closed the flap behind him, and out of courtesy, I moved over to a nearby picnic bench to sip the mint tea and relax.

It was a perfect early autumn day. If you’ve never been to New England in the fall, you have to make a trip because it’s just breathtakingly beautiful. I won’t live anywhere there isn’t four seasons; the fun of living in Boston is that you can get any one of the four at almost any time: New Englanders live for the January Thaw when, in the middle of the worst of winter, we’ll get a few days of 40-60 degree weather, and all the snow (if we’ve had any that year) will melt. And when Spring first shows her face… there is always one day in March when the temperature will shoot up to 65 degrees and the world will smell GREEN, that incredible scent that promises the cold is leaving and the world is waking up again. On that day, every Bostonian that can gets out for the day—busts out the lighter jacket, the non-winter footwear, and just basks in the weather. We bitch and piss and moan constantly about the weather, but let me tell you, REAL New Englanders, real Bostonians, won’t live anywhere else because we’ve got the best weather in the world. We NEVER get the horrible extremes that you get down South—no hurricanes wiping out the entire freakin’ coast—or like in Buffalo or Chicago, where you’re either buried in snow from October until nearly June or the wind rips your skin off; or like the Midwest where a tornado can take out a town with almost no warning, or Cali where half the state burns down while the other half falls into cracks in the earth. We may get a couple of weeks of extreme heat in the summer (and the humidity SUCKS ASS), but for the most part, it’s a really temperate place to live. Our springs are lovely (when winter doesn’t decide to go straight into summer like it usually does), but our
autumns…

Our autumns are GLORIOUS. I live in a city where just driving down a street at the height of fall can break my heart with its utter beauty because the trees are a riot of color and the sun creates a golden light that fills my soul with utter peace and joy.

I love where I live.

Today was one of those days. We’d hit September, our first real autumn day when the blast of summer had chilled a bit, and the trees had started to change, although peak hadn’t hit yet down here, and probably wouldn’t for at least another three weeks but there was already a carpet of old pine needles and new-fallen leaves, and the air was scented with wood smoke from Ronnie’s little fire and a couple others around the compound, roasting meats from the cookhouses, crushed pine, a little whiff of stables, and that lovely, loamy fall smell… leaf mould, earth, dew… Gods, I love that smell. For me, that’s the smell of adventure and potential, the scent of life to come. All combining with the lovely mint steam of the tea slid me into a gentle meditative state.

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Soooooo... whatcha think?

And don't forget to hit up the other blogs in today's little challenge.