WIP Wednesdays

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Out-takes on WIP Wednesday

I often cut scenes when I edit. Sometimes, I know even as I write them that they’re not going to be needed, but I still need to write them to get where I’m going. Sometimes, I love them dearly, but find out there’s a better way to achieve the same result. And sometimes I cut them reluctantly because I like them a lot, but they add nothing to plot or character.

This week, I’m busily writing a prequel to Unkept Promises that will never go in the book. It’s set seven years before the novel, and I posted the start of it a couple of weeks ago. Mia meets Jules when they are imprisoned together in a smugglers’ cave.

It is coming along, and I intend the whole sequence to be my next newsletter short story, from when Jules realises someone is in the next cell to where Jules kisses his new bride chastely on the forehead and rides off to Portsmouth and his ship.

Do you have a favourite deleted scene you’d like to share? Post it in the comments! Here’s the next bit of mine.

“Miss,” Jules hissed. The girl startled back from her father. Her face, already white, turned whiter as she faced the door, putting her body between herself and the unconscious man.

“I’m a prisoner,” Jules reassured her. “In the next cell.”

The girl held the candle high as she stood, peering towards the sound of his voice. He kept talking to guide her. “Lieutenant Julius Redepenning of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, at your service, Miss. I am going to get out of here, and I’m going to take you and your father with me.”

The face turned up to him was just leaving childhood behind, but the eyes shone with intelligence and her response indicated more maturity than he expected. “I hope you can, Lieutenant. But if your cell is as sturdy as mine, I beg leave to reserve judgement.” She sighed. “I am sorry for your predicament, but I will not deny I am glad to have company.”

“May I borrow the candle?” Jules asked. Her eyes widened in alarm and he rushed to add, “just for long enough to check my cell. They left me without light.” Without food or drink, either, but he would not tell her that. Perhaps the smugglers intended to supply him, and if they didn’t, he would not take the supply she needed for herself and her father.

She passed the candle up, her worry palpable, and he hoisted himself higher with one hand so that he could stretch the other through the bars. “I will be careful, Miss, I promise.”

“Mia,” she said. “Euronyme Stirling, but formality seems out of place, here.”

He returned her smile. She was a brave little girl; he had to find a way out for her. “Call me Jules,” he offered, “as my friends do.”

He rested the candle — a stubby bit of wax with a rope wick — on the sill between the bars and dropped, shaking the ache out of the shoulder that had taken most of his weight. When he reached the candle down, Mia let out an involuntary whimper at the loss of light.

“I have it safe,” he said. “You shall have it back in a minute.”

“I do without it most of the time,” she replied. “It’s just — I have always known I could light it again.”

Most of the time? “How long have you been here?” Jules asked, keeping his voice light and casual against the lump in his throat at her gallantry.

She answered a question with one of her own. “What is today? Tuesday? Or later.”

“Tuesday, probably. It was late Monday evening when I came across the smugglers. They knocked me out, but surely not for long.”

“The tenth of June? It was the fourth when Papa and I…” she trailed off, a small gulp the only sign of her distress.

Six days. Perhaps seven. “How long has your Papa…” Surely she had not been nursing a sick man all this time?

“They hit him when they attacked us, but I think — I wonder if he has had an apoplexy, Jules.” She took a deep shuddering breath and spoke again, her voice once more under her control. “He has not woken since that day. I have managed to get some water into him, but…”

“No food,” he guessed.

“They have given us nothing to eat.”

Bastards. They’d left her mostly in the dark, with no food, little water, and a dying father. He had been exploring his cell while they talked, and found no comfort in it. The door was firmly set, its hinges on the outside where he couldn’t reach them, though he ran his knife through the gap between the wood of the door and the stone of the walls, and guessed the hinges were iron by the sound they made. The door had a small hole, just big enough for someone outside to peer in, or for food or a small drug to be passed through. He pushed the shutter that blocked the hold from the other side, but it didn’t shift.

The only other gap in the stone was the high barred window between his cell and Mia’s. He put the candle up on the sill, and then added the bun, still wrapped in his handkerchief. That meant pulling himself up by the bars at the other end of the window, and the one closest to the edge shifted slightly as he put his weight on it.

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Telling or showing in WIP Wednesday

Show, don’t tell, beginning authors are told. And it’s good advice. Put the reader inside the scene and let them watch it unfolding. Don’t give them a character (or worse still, a narrator) who fills in all the backstory in paragraph after paragraph.

Like all good advice, as you gain more experience you know when to ignore it. Showing is usually best. Except when it isn’t. Use the comments to share an excerpt with either sharing or telling, and tell us why you chose to do it that way.

I’ve been thinking of taking one of my newsletter short stories, and turning it into a novella for a box set the Bluestocking Belles might publish for Valentine’s Day 2019. Because of the format, they tend to have a bit of telling — purely and simply to keep the story short. Like this bit from the story I might rewrite, The Mouse Fights Back. (For those who don’t subscribe to my newsletter, each one contains the start of a short story written exclusively for newsletter subscribers and a link to the rest of the story plus all the others I’ve written so far. Click on the link in the side menu to subscribe for this and heaps of other free stuff.)

They were trying to kill his Mouse.

The runaway carriage might have been an accident. Such things happen. Mouse was shopping, with Jasper and two footmen in attendance, when it careened down the street, and only Jasper’s quick thinking and quicker action saved her from injury or worse. He thrust her into a doorway, protecting her with his body, and the carriage passed close enough to tear the back out of his jacket. The footmen both jumped clear. Hampered by her skirts, Mouse could well have been killed.

The shot that just missed her in Hyde Park must surely have been deliberate, though the magistrate called to investigate insisted on regarding it as carelessness at worst. “Some foolish young man making bets with his friends. Not at all the thing. Your wife could have been hurt, and how would they feel then?” Tiberius’s own investigators found a trampled spot in the bushes, probably the place where the assassin had waited to make his shot.

Tiberius doubled the guard on Mouse when she went out, and thought about confining her to the house, but couldn’t bear to curtail the freedom she was enjoying so much as she visited the art galleries, shops and museums she’d been barred from when she was under her aunt’s paw.

His own estate, his investigation into his uncle and stepmother, and Mouse’s affairs kept him busy during the day, and he couldn’t escort her as often as he wished.

As her husband, he now owned her inheritance, but extracting it—or, more likely, what was left of it—from Lord Demetrius’s hands was proving to be difficult, with his uncle’s lawyers throwing up one obstacle after another. Tiberius didn’t need the money, but he would be damned if Lord Demetrius was going to have it. Besides, as Jasper said, if they could prove the wicked uncle had stolen from Mouse’s trust, they would have a reason to have him arrested, and the whole sorry saga could be put to rest.

And then he could spend time with his delightful, fascinating, sweet little wife, who was blossoming like a rose away from the bitter atmosphere of her aunt’s home. The old harridan’s oppression had not suppressed Mouse’s intelligence or her sense of humour. It had made her afraid of almost everything, and every day he saw more reason to admire her courage as she fought through her fear and faced the world with a cheerful smile.

He dodged five more suspicious accidents and outright attacks, but none of them bothered him as much as the crowd of drunken slum dwellers who mobbed Mouse and her footmen in the street as she emerged from his house. He sallied out with the rest of the household and drove the attackers off. She was shaken, but not hurt. This time.

“You need to send her to Redfern,” Jasper scolded, after Tiberius had hugged her, examined her for injury, and handed her over to her maid so she could wash and change. “Every time she goes out in London, she is in danger.”

He was right. At the earldom’s principal estate, Tiberius could control every inch of ground for acres around. He had purged Redfern of the few servants who owed allegiance to Lady Bowden, and those who remained had either been born and brought up on the estate, or were people of his own. She would be far safer there. But he hated the thought of staying in London alone.

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Before the book on WIP Wednesday

I’ve fallen into a process of writing until I find the start of a book. Real life, of course, isn’t tidy. Stories don’t have a beginning (except, perhaps, conception) or an end (except, perhaps, death). Before the beginning and after the end of life, the story belongs to other people, I suppose.

Novels are much tidier. We authors decide where the story starts and where it ends. And I always have trouble deciding.

Is the start the first meeting between my couple? Possibly, but what brought them to where they are? Maybe they’ve known one another for ever, but a crisis brings them together. Do we start with the crisis? Maybe they are already married, as in my latest novella for the Bluestocking Belles, but have drifted apart. Where does that one start?

I’m thinking about this because I’m beginning the next Redepenning novel, Unkept Promises. My hero and heroine have been married for seven years, and haven’t met or even been in the same country since the day of their wedding. Do I start with the circumstances that brought them together when she was fifteen and imprisoned by smugglers? Or with Mia arriving in Cape Town seven years later to take over from her husband’s mistress as lady of his house? Or with Jules turning up at his house to find things had changed?

Post me your start, or a pre-start unused scene, here in the comments?

Wherever I start, I need to know what happened before, so I’m thinking about writing the scenes in the smugglers den, even if they are only posted here or in my newsletter. It’ll go something like this.

At first, Jules thought the blow on the head had robbed him of his sight. But as he surfaced from the weight of the enormous headache that pinned him to the stone floor where they’d left him, he decided darkness was a more likely explanation. He moved cautiously, with protests from the bruises and aches from various kicks and blows the scurvy smugglers had landed. It didn’t take long to feel his way around the small uneven rock cave — with a sturdy wooden door — in which they’d placed him. It was empty, and he was alone.

Time crawled by as he waited for something to happen; time enough for hunger and thirst to gnaw away at his usual blithe disregard for his own mortality. He was sitting with his back against the wall, contemplating the mistakes that had brought him here, when he heard voices, so close they were almost in the room with him.

First, a groan. Then a girl’s voice, light and high. “Are you awake, Papa?”

The light came as a surprise, shining like a beacon from the other side of a barred opening set high up in one wall. Standing, Jules managed to reach the bars and pull himself up, to look through into another cell very like his own. A man, curled on a mess of rags and clothing, shifting restlessly. His eyes were shut, and he had not responded to the girl who crouched beside him. She was a skinny child, still boyish in shape, but he did not suppose that would save her from the smugglers. Jules made an instant vow to save her, whatever the cost.

The girl held the candle she had lit away in one hand to cast its light without dripping its wax, and brushed back the hair that fell over the man’s forehead.”Oh, Papa,” she said, her voice trembling.

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The right (or the wrong) clothes on WIP Wednesday

 

People say it shouldn’t matter, but it does. When you know you are well dressed, in clothes that suit you and that are suitable for the occasion, you can relax and enjoy yourself. Clothing that gives a character confidence, or clothing that doesn’t work, is often a feature of a story, making us sympathetic to the character or showing some aspect of their personality.

So this week, I’m looking for extracts that describe what your character is wearing and how they feel about it. Mine is from House of Thorns.

As her betrothed assisted her into his chaise on Sunday morning, Rosa was conscious of two conflicting emotions. One was relief that she could leave the house for long enough to attend the church service, since the new maids had shown themselves both willing and able to look after her father in her absence. The other was trepidation. She and Bear would be the center of attention once the banns were read for the first time. The Pelmans and the Thrextons would find something to censure, made up or real, and they had their supporters in the village.

I would feel more confident if I had something suitable to wear, she thought.

Bear had dressed for the occasion, pale breeches and stockings, a dark blue coat over an embroidered waistcoat with a creamy froth of lace at neck and cuff. He didn’t favor the excesses they showed in the fashion magazines she sometimes saw at the village shop, but the materials were of the best quality and beautifully cut to fit his frame.

Rosa’s Sunday-best gown had had more than six years of use, new clothes being a luxury the Neathams could not afford after the new Lord Hurley stopped the pension the former Lord Hurley had once paid. She had tried to keep it from dirt and harm, but six years is more than 300 Sundays, even allowing for those when she could not find anyone to sit with her father and had to miss services.

Turning the back panel to move the shiny spot, carefully mending tears, and cutting off the cuffs to replace them with a band taken from another gown could not disguise the fact that her Sunday-best would be a Monday-washday gown for almost any other woman in the parish.

Next to Bear, she looked like a pauper, which was not far from the truth.

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Transport on WIP Wednesday

 

In my stories, people travel. A lot. The Realm of Silence is a road trip story, and so is Gingerbread Bride. In almost everything I’ve written, the characters need to get from one place to another by whatever means of transport was available. In the latest novella for the Bluestocking Belles, Paradise Regained, I’m just writing a camel train, a caravan. Did you know that the largest could have thousands of camels? Wow. House of Thorns meant researching the earliest steam ferries on the Mersey. For Never Kiss a Toad, which is early Victorian, my co-author and I have spent a lot of time calculating journey times on ships and trains.  I’ve gifted the heroine of my latest contemporary novella, Beached, with a dual fuel (gas and electricity) car, and the hero has what New Zealanders call a utility vehicle, or ute.

So transport is this week’s theme. Comments with your excerpts are very welcome! Here’s mine, from Beached.

They went in Zee’s ute—his pickup he called it—leaving after breakfast. Nikki had offered her car, but Zee said he had some stuff to pick up for Dave, and needed the pickup’s bed.

Nikki decided not to call him on being a typical male, hating to be driven. Besides, she enjoyed watching his competent hands on the wheel and not driving meant she could enjoy the scenery—both inside and outside the car.

“We’ve gone as far as we can with the demolition,” Zee explained, as the truck skirted the foreshore. “I’ve got the crew tidying up today, and I’ve a few jobs lined up for next week that don’t need permits, but we’ll run out pretty quick. No problem if the council sticks to their ten-day timeline, but if anything is holding them up, I want to know about it ahead of time. If I let Dave take the team off your house and get involved in another job, who knows when we’ll get them back?”

“I thought you worked for Dave?” Nikki teased, prompting a broad smile and a sideways glance.

“Believe me, Nikki, I’m working for you on this one.” No misinterpreting that, although all week he’d been blowing hot and cold. She’d manufactured several opportunities for them to be alone, and any other man would have made a move by now. Showing an interest had always been enough and she’d done that, surely? Perhaps he was shy. Or she hadn’t been obvious enough.

They had the whole day together today; time enough for things to develop.

The road made its turn from the coast, running beside the estuary before turning to climb into the hills.

“Is this anything like where you grew up?” Nikki asked.

Zee laughed. “Not much! Me and my mom lived with her dad up on a mountain in Wyoming. They call it off the grid these days. To me, it was just the way you lived. Fishing in the lake for lunch. Hunting to put meat on the table. School was lessons with mom or grandpop, not just out of books but in our everyday lives. I learnt design hands-on, making things with grandpop.”

“It sounds idyllic,” Nikki commented.

“I remember it as idyllic. At least until…” He trailed off, his hands on the wheel clenching then releasing.

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Correspondence on WIP Wednesday

 

For an author, correspondence can be handy, letting us tell the reader a bit of backstory without beating them around the head with it. Of course, this presumes a certain context — literacy, for a start. But in the historic novels I write, I use notes and letters quite a bit. In contemporaries, the equivalent would be a text message or an email.

This week, I have a piece for you from my latest contemporary, a novella for the Authors of Main Street summer collection: Summertime on Main Street Volume 1. In Beached, my hero has become estranged from his family, but is writing to his father.

Feel free to post your extracts in the comments. I’d love to read them.

The email took a long time to write. Zee knew what he needed to say, but the words didn’t come easily. Twice, he deserted his laptop to do other things — take Oliver out for a walk, do a bit of cleaning around the apartment, catch up on his laundry, set dinner simmering in the slow cooker. In the end, he thought he had it. Reading it over carefully, he adjusted a few words here and there, went to send, then changed his mind and resaved as a draft.

Stop procrastinating, you idiot.

It was as good as it was going to get. He opened the draft and clicked on the send button before he could have second — no, nineteenth or twentieth thoughts.

 

Hi Dad

It’s Drew here. I should have been in touch long ago. In fact, I shouldn’t have stormed off without first talking to you. And I’m going to admit straight up front that I’d still be putting off writing if I didn’t want something.

First, the apology. I knew fairly early on that you couldn’t have been involved in Pat’s conspiracy with that guy at Global Earth Watch. It just isn’t your style, or Michael’s either. I’m sorry I didn’t figure that out before I blew up.

That wasn’t why I left, though it was the trigger for the timing. I’d been thinking of trying something else, outside of O’Neal Hotel Corporation, for quite a while. I needed to see if I could make it on my own. I should have talked to you about that, too. Looking back, I can see that you’ve always supported all of us to do what we thought was right for us. You might have argued — probably would have. But just to be sure I’d thought things through, and then I would have had your blessing to make my own decision.

I’m sorry for judging you and getting it wrong.

I’ve been living in New Zealand, which I expect you knew. And I’m guessing you knew I’ve gone back to my old name. Zachary Henderson, not Andrew O’Neal. When Grandma and I decided to change my name back when I first came to live with you, you understood it was part of me trying to fit in. I hope you’ll understand that I needed to be that guy again, and see what he could grow into without the corporation and the O’Neal history behind him.

But, as Grandma always said, family is family. I like being Z. Henderson of Valentine Bay, New Zealand. But I’ll also always be an O’Neal. I needed some distance and the good friends I’ve found here to understand that.

Which brings me to my request. There’s a developer here who is building a hotel in a beautiful spot not far from where I live. Not a bad idea. The local economy would benefit from a properly designed and targeted project, one that respected the local community and the environment.

I have fears about the project as it stands, especially since Chow xxxx seems to be involved. I overheard him talking to the developer about bringing in his own labour, but his name appears nowhere in the publically available documentation, which is attached.

I have tried following the trail from the named investors to Chow. I’m sure there’s a connection, but I can’t find it. Would you put some people on to it? I’m happy to cover any costs.

Dad, I’d like to keep in touch. Give my love to the rest of the family, and feel free to pass on my email address.

 

How to sign off had bewildered him for a while. Just his name seemed far too cold. ‘Kind regards’ was too business like, and ‘Love’ was a step too far. He did love his father, and he knew his father loved him, but a male O’Neal didn’t talk about such things. In the end, he settled on ‘I miss you all, Drew’.

He hovered over the laptop, berating himself for expecting an instant reply. His father was a busy man, and might — in any case — need some time to come to terms with an out-of-blue contact from the prodigal son. But in less than fifteen minutes, the laptop dinged for an incoming message.

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Meet the villain on WIP Wednesday

Or villainess, of course. I have a fondness for female antagonists. An author has a lot of scope when introducing a villain. We might know straight away that he or she is the bad guy, or it might dawn on us over time, as we watch things go wrong for the hero and heroine.

I’d love to see an excerpt from your work-in-progress showing the antagonist’s first appearance in the book. Mine is from my contemporary novella, Beached. My heroine and her friend are having morning tea at a table on the footpath (sidewalk, you Americans) outside a cafe.

“Nicola Watson! Thought you’d have headed back to the bright lights of Noo York by now.” The speaker grabbed a chair from one of the other tables, and turned it back on to Nikki’s and Becky’s table before straddling it. “Checking out the old home town, eh? Quite a bit bigger than when you were here last.”

Pencil Kenworth. Sunglasses hid his eyes, and a cloth sunhat masked his bald patch, but if she hadn’t seen him at the funeral, she still would have recognised the raspy voice which hadn’t changed since he’d done his best to make her life miserable in high school.

Thank goodness for dear friends, who had turned tables on him. When she’d refused him a date, he’d told the whole school that she’d been abandoned by her mother and didn’t know her father. She’d laughed that off, but only until she heard his outrageous claim that he’d dated her back in Valentine Bay, had sex with her, and then dropped her because she cheated on him with anyone who would pay her fee. That story was around the school before she heard it.

Becky and Dave took the lead in the revenge. Becky came up with some creative storytelling about the origin of Pencil’s nickname, linking it to the size and function of an appendage most male teenagers don’t want to have questioned. Dave, the captain of the first XV rugby team, enlisted his team mates to spread the tale in a whisper there and a snigger here. Since Kenworth was not much liked, people were happy to spread the tale, and soon convinced that he’d lied about Nikki in order to cover his own inability to perform.

By the end of the school year, she almost felt sorry for him, and she was relieved when he did not return the following year. He’d joined his father’s real estate firm, and their paths didn’t cross again. Though she heard that he’d put considerable effort into finding females who would allow him to demonstrate the falsity of the rumours about him.

Thirteen years later, he headed the firm, since his father had retired to focus on his duties as a district councillor, so Nikki was not surprised when he said, “I guess you need to sell the old house before you leave. Put it in my hands, and I’ll get you a good price, for old times sake. Of course, it needs a lot of work, but I’m sure I can find someone in the market for a fixer upper.”

“Thank you for the offer,” Nikki told him, “but I doubt if I will sell.”

“Keeping it for a rental, are you?” Pencil nodded, pursing his lips, his eyes narrowed as he considered this. “Not a bad idea. Paradise Bay is on the move, and the new hotel is going to put it on the map. You’ll need to do some work before it’s fit to live in, even if the rent’s cheap. Here, take my card. We manage property rentals. No need to worry your pretty little head about the place while we’re looking after it. In fact, I have some builders you can use — much cheaper than the Mastertons.”

Becky enquired sweetly, “Cheap like the apartments in Brayden Street?”

Pencil ignored her, continuing to address himself to Nikki. “You just give me a ring, Nicola. Or drop me an email.” He dropped his voice and leant towards her across the back of the chair. “I’m happy to make myself available to you at any time.” He waggled his eyebrows to underline the suggestive nature of the offer.

Thirteen years had not improved the man. It had, however, taught Nikki the futility of arguing with people like him. “I haven’t made a decision, Mr Kenworth. But thank you for the card. Good day to you.”

“Mr Kenworth? No need for such formality between old friends.” Pencil went to pat Nikki’s arm, caught her glare, and changed his mind. “Call me Pencil, like you used to.”

Margaret emerged from the shop with their tea on a tray: a teapot under a knitted cosy, two cups on saucers, a small jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar.

Pencil sneered. “You won’t appeal to the young crowd with that old fashioned stuff, Maggie. You need decent sized mugs and a good barista. Yes, and a coat of paint to brighten the place up. If you’d accept my offer—”

“Thank you, Margaret,” Becky interrupted. “That’s perfect.”

Pencil tapped Margaret on the arm. “You might as well fetch me a cup.”

Nikki decided to be firm. “I am sorry, Pencil. Becky and I were having a private conversation, and we’d like to continue it. Thank you for stopping by.”

Reluctantly, the man accepted his dismissal, cancelled his order for tea, and strolled off down the footpath, hitching the belt that curved under his belly as he went.

“The apartments in Brayden Street?” Nikki prompted as she watched him walk away.

“Pencil’s investment and a builder from xxx. They cut corners from the first. Designed to use minimum materials, used the cheapest materials, breached code when they could get away with it. Within two years they were being sued by purchasers.”

“Serves them right,” Nikki said. “I suppose they walked away with a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket.”

Becky shrugged, her focus seemingly on the tea she was pouring, only the grim set of her jaw indicating her irritation. “The builder went bankrupt and started up again under another name. Pencil managed to slither out from under — convinced a judge that his only role was funding the project, and that he was as much a victim as any of the house owners.”

Nikki accepted the cup Becky passed. “Slippery as ever. What is he still doing in Paradise Bay? You’d think somewhere like Auckland or Wellington would offer him more scope. Or over the ditch in Sydney or Brisbane.”

“He spent several years across the Tasman,” Becky confirmed. “The story is he came home because his father needed him. There are other stories, but let’s not waste a perfectly nice day thinking about Pencil Kenworth. Are you really thinking about staying? And what do you plan to do with the house? It isn’t as bad as Pencil says, but it does need work.”

“Dave is sending over the luscious lodger to take a look,” Nikki said. “I’ll have a better idea once I know what needs to be done, and how much it might cost.”

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Meet the heroine on WIP Wednesday

An elegant establishment for young ladies, by Francis Burney

Last week, we talked about the reader’s first encounter with our hero. This week, let’s spotlight the heroine. Put an excerpt in the comment that shows the first time your heroine appears in the book. Mine is a scene from The Realm of Silence — a scene less than a couple of weeks old, written in response to a request from my editor, who thought my first effort at a first meeting was a bit lame. (She put it far more politely than that.)

Susan Cunningham fumbled for the chair behind her, her legs suddenly too weak to keep her upright.

“Missing?” she repeated, frowning as she tried to make the word mean something else. Anything else. “But where? How?”

Mrs Fellowes, the proprietor and headmistress, took the chair behind the desk, her lips pinched and her nostrils flared. “The school has been much deceived, Mrs Cunningham. The girls clearly planned this escapade very carefully. We could not have discovered their absence any earlier.”

“I don’t understand…” Susan frowned, trying to think through the panic that howled and gibbered in her mind. “How can she be missing?” Slowly, as if working in thick mud, her mind pulled some more facts out of the headmistress’s complaint. “How long has she been gone? Who is she with?”

“We could not have known,” Mrs Fellowes insisted. “The girls sent a note saying they were going to the art exhibition with Miss Foster, Miss Grahame’s aunt, and that Miss Cunningham would stay with her friend for the remainder of the weekend. This is a common occurrence, Mrs Cunningham, and has your approval.”

That was true. Patrice Grahame was Amy’s dearest friend. Wait. The weekend? “This was yesterday?” she asked. Please let it be yesterday. Surely two sixteen-year-old girls could not travel far in one day?

Mrs Fellowes sniffed. “Not Sunday, no. The notes were sent on Saturday morning, Mrs Cunningham, and Miss Grahame and Miss Cunningham have not been seen since.”

She unbent a little, “I was in the process of writing you a letter when you arrived unexpectedly.” A slight edge to that last word. Mrs Fellowes did not approve of parents who arrived during term time, and without warning. But Susan had been passing on her way to London, with only a ten-mile detour between her and her daughter.

Not to the point. Susan reined in her skittering thoughts and pursued the question of why two girls could be absent from Saturday to Monday with no one the wiser.

“Did Miss Foster not report the girls missing?”

“She also received a note, in which the girls said Miss Grahame would be staying at the school with your daughter. I am very disappointed in them, Mrs Cunningham. They are not biddable girls, but I had not thought them liars.” She sniffed again, jerking her chin upward as she did so. “You will wish to speak to Miss Foster. You have her direction, I imagine.”

Susan was ushered firmly to the door before she could formulate a response and did not think to ask what measures had been taken to find the missing girls until she was halfway to Miss Foster’s townhouse. She continued on, as more and more questions crowded her mind. Perhaps Miss Foster knew the answers. If not, she would go back to the school and demand explanations. Later.

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Meet the hero on WIP Wednesday

We set the scene for our book by the way we meet our main characters. Does the reader like them? Have we picked up their lives at an interesting or crucial moment? Are they showing a little of who they really are? Is there a hook that intrigues — perhaps something that tells us the nature of the coming conflict?

Sometimes, I start a story several times, looking for that right place in my characters’ lives to bring them onto the page. Sometimes, I start with a secondary character or even (in one case) one who kicked off the whole sequence of events for the heroine, but was dead before the rest of the story takes place. In today’s excerpt, I introduce the hero of The Realm of Silence, less than a fortnight away from publication on my website shop, and so only just a work-in-progress in the most technical of senses.

Please feel free to drop your own excerpts in the comments (just heroes, please. I’m saving villains and heroines for a later blog.)

Gil Rutledge sat in the small garden to the side of the Crown and Eagle, and frowned at the spread provided for his breakfast. Grilled trout with white butter sauce, soft-boiled eggs, grilled kidney, sausages, mashed potatoes, bacon, a beef pie, two different kinds of breads (one lightly toasted), bread rolls, a selection of preserves, and a dish of stewed peaches, all cooked to perfection and none of it appealing.

Two days with his sister, Madelina, had left old guilt sitting heavy in his stomach, choking his throat and souring his digestion. And the errand he faced had yet to face did not improve his appetite.

He cut the corner from a slice of toast and loaded it with bits of bacon and a spoonful of egg. He was too old a campaigner to allow loss of appetite to stop him from refuelling. He washed the mouthful down with a sip from his coffee. It was the one part of the breakfast Moffat had not trusted to the inn kitchen. His soldier-servant insisted on preparing it himself, since he knew how Gil like it.

No. Not his soldier-servant. Not anymore. His valet, butler, factotum. Manservant. Yes, his manservant.

Gil raised the cup to the shade of his despised older brother. “This is the worst trick you’ve played on me yet,” he muttered. The viscount’s death had landed the estranged exile with a title he never wanted, a bankrupt estate, a frail frightened sister-in-law and her two little daughters—left to his guardianship but fled from his home—and an endless snarl of legal and financial problems. And then there were Gil’s mother and his younger sister. His mission in leaving Gloucestershire had been to avoid war with the first and make peace with the second.

With a sigh, he took another sip, and loaded his fork again. The sooner he managed to swallow some of this meal, the sooner he could be on the road.

by

Beginnings on WIP Wednesday

I’ve started my contemporary again, so I figured today was a good day to have beginnings as my WIP theme. Book beginnings, chapter beginnings — you choose. Mine is the (new) first scene in Beached, which I’m writing for the Authors of Main Street boxed set.

The road home wound through the hills until the sudden last corner before the coast. Nik had known the way by heart since she was a small girl, returning from a shopping expedition or a sports event.

In recent years, the little fishing settlement was discovered by weekenders. Land Transport New Zealand had been hard at work during Nik’s decade overseas, widening and straightening, cutting through slopes and filling hollows. The first time she’d driven out here a few months ago, the alterations made it unfamiliar.

But she’d been twice more, to check on the beach house for Gran and Poppa, and the landmarks beyond the road remained the same. A clump of native bush still screened Murphy’s Pond, a favourite summer swimming hole. They’d built a lookout with a picnic spot over Pleasant Valley, but the view of farmland, bush, river, and hills remained as beautiful as ever, and the hill known as Two Heads was still as impressive as ever, even if some aesthetically challenged cretin had somehow obtained permission to quarry on one side.

The road dropped down again from the hillside into the river flats. This time, the long row of massive willows at the river’s edge signalled the difference, growing steadily smaller as they approached the tidal reaches. No more hills, and in a moment she would have her first sight of the sea.

“There, Nikki,” Poppa used to say as they rounded that last corner, “the sea. Nothing else between us and South America.”

The numbness behind which she had hidden her grief lifted for a moment, pierced by a shaft of pure joy. Not allowing herself to feel had helped her survive the second funeral a mere week after the first, and the long days that followed. Coming home had been the right move. She could mourn them properly in the landscapes of her childhood: not the diminished frail couple she had nursed and cared for these past few months, but the Gran and Poppa of twenty and thirty years ago; the only parents she had known or needed.

The car, Poppa’s little hybrid, seemed as eager as she to eat up the last five miles, gaining speed on the gentler curves around the little coves and over the small prominatories between her and Paradise Bay. Gran and Poppa had left most of their estate to be split between their three grandchildren — her and the half-siblings she barely knew. But the beach house at Paradise Bay was left to her alone, and the decision to keep it had never needed to be made. She had been born there; had spent her early years in that community; had left only for high school and later for university. It was home.

Beks, her dearest friend from school and a faithful correspondent in all the years away, had promised to air the place and make up a bed with fresh sheets. She would undoubtedly stock the cupboards, too, though she’d insisted that Nik join her and her family for a meal tonight. Nik found she was looking forward to it. Beks had married her high-school sweetheart, and she and Dave had both known Gran and Poppa.

She began to hum the song Gran always sang as they finished this last stretch of the coast. “Our house, is a very, very, very fine house…”

Soon. Soon she would be home.