Discussing Maya

Here's a longish sample of some dialogue. Right now my the dialogue tends to read like competing monologues, which isn't great. I'm getting better at adding props and detail in to break things up a bit.

I think pretty much everything you need to know is covered in the sample:

Maya sat on a SETTEE up against the wall. An elderly man was in the process of removing a pressure cuff from her arm when Graham walked in. She offered him a weak smile, her color was off and she had dark circles under her eyes.

“Blood pressure checks fine, Mrs. Aguilar. There’s some tenderness in the abdomen match with what happened during the collision. Some swelling in her left ear, also not inconsistent with the accident. No broken bones, no cranial trauma beyond what I can see in the ear canal, no dissociative behavior, amnesia, or anything of that nature.”

On the other side of the sitting room a man walked past the archway, trailing a long, spiraled telephone cord behind him. “Whaddya mean we can’t sue him. He hit her with his damned boat of a car; that’s VEHICULAR MANSLAUGHTER right there.” The phone cord pulled taut as the man disappeared from view.

The doctor scratched his chin, “If WHAT’S HISFACE hadn’t said her heart had stopped beating and she was unresponsive to CPR I wouldn’t have believed anyone else saying she was actually dead. How this fella Gantt did what he did I don’t know. There’s no place in medical science for faith healing and miracles; still, I don’t have a better explanation to offer you.”

The phone cord in the other room dropped slack against the PARQUET floor. “But she was dead. We have witnesses. What about that?”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“I would really like to get her into the hospital, run some tests to make sure there’s no internal damage. Maybe see if we can find a logical explanation before people start lighting candles on your front porch.” He tried to force a smile.

“Well can we sue that preacher guy then? Tampering with evidence? That’s got to be worth something....”

Hearing her daughter reduced to the level of compromised evidence in someone’s twisted litigious scheme drove Geri into a rage.

“Get out of my house, you BASTARD!” She grabbed the handset and slammed it into the RECEIVER. “Get the HELL out of my house before I call my lawyer and tell him you’re violating the restraining order, you sick FFF–“ She stopped, biting her lower lip, aware that all conversation in the house had stopped and every eye was purposefully not looking directly at her.

Maya sat on the couch, eyes brimming with tears, her breath COMING in uneven (RAGGED?) HITCHES.

Geri continued, her tone icy, but not as loud, “Get out of my house now. I shouldn’t have let you in. I won’t make that mistake again.”

(daily word count: 1,767 words; total word count: 14,982 words; words remaining: 35,018)