I hope that more of you will post comments this week to help me celebrate my 2 month anniversary, so as a little incentive I will give a Twitter shout-out (or 2 or 3) to anyone on here who comments and wants said shout-out. Authors, think about the promotion opportunity here. Tell me the name of your website and I will include a link to that in my Twitter post as well.
But enough bribery. Writing is about the fun and the adventure, not the strong-arming of my readers. This week I have a really intense feeling to portray in my passage, and I think it is one that you will all be familiar with.
His eyelids slipped down once again. It was as though two twenty-pound weights were attached to them--the more he struggled to keep them open, the more readily they seemed to close. Despite his best intentions, he was fighting a losing battle.
It was ridiculous. He was a grown man, closer to forty than thirty, and he couldn't keep his eyes open. Opening them seemed almost painful now, as if the very muscles were protesting. His boss's voice became a dull hum, and his head kicked back as if he was jerking awake every time his eyes opened again.
He pushed up from the table, made an apologetic hand gesture, and headed toward the water cooler in the corner of the room. He got a glass of the cold liquid and threw it back like a shot of whiskey, then filled another glass and sipped more slowly. The water filled his mouth and slid down his throat. He shuddered a bit from the cold and from the hint of energy it generated. He tried to unobtrusively bounce on the balls of his feet and move his arms to get the blood flowing, but he caught a coworker looking at him and stopped, moving instead to sit back down.
The moment his butt connected with the seat, his vision blurred again. He hardly realized what was happening when the woman next to him passed him a stick of peppermint gum.
"It will help," she whispered.
He accepted it numbly and unwrapped the gum. He was too tired to respond to the refreshing smell of peppermint, and his jaws moved lethargically.
He wondered if he could get away with taking a nap during lunch hour.
He wondered how it could seem so impossible to keep his eyes open.
Again, please try your hand at writing your own descriptive passage in the comments below. It is a way to develop a skill (new or merely rusty) or show off your ability as a master wordsmith.