She walks across the shiny tiled floor and plucks her pencil from her apron pocket. "Hi, I'm Belinda. What'll ya have?"

You look at the laminated menu and notice the All-Day Breakfast Special. For only $3.99 you get three eggs, bacon or sausage, toast and juice, accompanied by a bottomless cup of coffee. Sounds good. "Gimme the Breakfast Special."

"Fried, boiled or scrambled?"

"Scrambled."

"Bacon or sausage?"

"Brown or white?"

"Apple or orange?"

"Decaf or regular?"

In about ten minutes, you have a satisfying plate of Coronary Club for just under four bucks.

Let's mosey down the street to a high end cafe.

A carefully coiffed waiter approaches, handing over a leather-bound folder.

"Good morning, my name is Alphonse but you can call me Al." He slides into the booth and leans earnestly forward. "Our special this morning is the Petit Déjeuner a la New Orleans. It consists of fluffy, mouth-watering scrambled free-range Omega-3 eggs, three crisp slices of grain-fed pancetta, artisan bread toasted to golden perfection, unsweetened organic orange juice and a steaming cup of cappucino made from Fair Trade coffee beans, roasted on the premises."

"Sounds great. How much is it?"

"Only $13.99."

Hell, when you describe it like that, it must be worth the extra ten bucks! Imaginative copy writing has raised the lowly breakfast to a culinary delight.

In case you don't know where I'm going with this, let's discuss one of the Cardinal Sins of the Novel Writer: Telling instead of Showing.

Telling:

The weather was very hot.

Showing:
Cloying mist hung in the air while a blistering sun climbed above the hill behind them. Day after day, puffy clouds sat at the line where sky met sea, keeping a discreet distance. They only moved closer to the island at sunset, often providing David and Margaret with a fantastic light show of pink and red and yellow. Day and night abruptly exchanged places, and under the cover of darkness the clouds occasionally crept over the island. They often went to sleep on a sultry, humid evening, then woke in the morning to a jungle dripping with the night's rain.

Telling:

It was a cold day.

Showing:

For the rest of the afternoon the pond was alive with the muffled sound of metal blades scraping on windswept, uneven ice mixed with chatter and laughter. Occasionally a cracking sound echoed off the densely treed, steep hillsides when two wooden sticks collided. The sun, a pale white disk, barely succeeded its feeble attempt to penetrate the icy haze in the platinum sky.

Is it worth an extra ten bucks?

-- Sandra Cormier

Excerpt One is from my first novel The Space Between (July 2007). Excerpt Two (unedited) is from my upcoming novel Bad Ice (July 2008).