Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work in progress or part of someone else’s work with LGBT characters at Rainbow Snippets, here https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974

For Pride Month I’m posting snippets from “Office Of the Lost,” a fun new novel written by my friends J. Scott Coatsworth and Kim Fielding. https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com/book/office-of-the-lost/ They alternated writing chapters, and last week we met Crispin, a Desk Fae at the aforementioned Office. This week, we meet Leo, uh I mean, Leopold Lane. A guy with enough bad luck to plot a soap opera for a decade.

His apartment was only a few blocks away, on the upper floor of a house that had been pretty nice a hundred or so years ago but had long since sagged into disrepair. His place—a cramped bedroom, a living room with a closet-sized kitchen, and a Lilliputian bathroom—was in a converted attic reachable by two flights of rickety outdoor stairs. The climb had been miserably hot in summer and was now cold and damp, making the ascent both dangerous and uncomfortable. Today he walked up the stairs more slowly than usual because his ankle was sore from the puddle incident, and he somehow managed not to fall to an untimely death on the cracked and weed-infested pavement of the parking lot below.

Okay, here’s just a little more of our introduction to Leopold Lane:

But still, Leopold liked it. He found it charming that none of the walls were plumb and none of the corners formed perfect right angles. His landlord had seemingly used the dregs of several paint cans, resulting in walls that had large patches of varied whites and beiges. Leopold liked that too. He loved it when the floors and rafters creaked and when the pipes made noises like dying ancient sea monsters.

Also, it was cheap.

I like Leopold!

Oh, and for the record, Scott and Kim alternated writing the chapters of “Office Of the Lost.” Kim wrote the ones from Leopold’s point-of-view and Scott wrote the ones from Crispin’s point-of-view. We’ll see them together in next week’s snippets.

Until then, take care! —-jeff