WIP Wednesdays

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Brothers or sisters on WIP Wednesday

d78ec673dec2a74d62d4bed3f8dd7badAll of a character’s intimate interactions can help to display or develop character, and in some ways no one knows you better or can more easily push your buttons than your brothers and sisters (or cousins or other close relations that you grew up with.

In this week’s WIP Wednesday, I’m looking for an excerpt that shows your related characters in a scene where we learn something about them because of what they think or how they behave.

They had talked it over at length while still staying with Charlotte, and in the carriage on the way from Essex. At inordinate length.

Charity could not, would not stay in Selby’s cottage. She would go somewhere she was not known, and introduce herself as a widow, using another name. Mrs Smith, she said, for who was to find one Mrs Smith among thousands?

But how she and the children were to live was a problem. Prue would help, of course. She could double the allowance she was paying for Antonia’s care, would triple it if Charity would allow. Tolliver’s work paid well enough, and she had a little set aside.

Charity wanted to borrow Prue’s nest egg. She had some idea of setting up a milliner’s shop. Not in London, but somewhere that was cheaper to live and safer for the children. “Even you said I make beautiful hats, Prue,” she argued.

True enough, but running a business required more than an eye for fashion and an artistic touch with a needle. Prue didn’t want to see her savings disappear and leave Charity and the girls in a worse case than before.

“We need somewhere for you and the children while we think about how best to make your plan work,” she told Charity. “I know a lady who supports women in trouble such as yours. She may have a place.” Or she may never wish to speak to Prue again, in which case they would have to think of something else.

One thing Charity was determined on; Prue was not to ask Selby to support his daughters until they were somewhere he could not find them. “It is not as if he is going to give us any money, anyway, Prue. He barely gave us a thing when I thought I was his wife. Just a few pounds now and again when he visited. He paid the servants directly and is several quarters in arrears, Prue. Oh dear. Should I not pay them before I let them go?” Another problem for her to worry at until Prue was ready to leap screaming from the carriage with her hands over her ears.

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Assumptions on WIP Wednesday

eve2I’ve been banging my head against assumptions today. Four different parts of my busy life blew up on me because of diverse assumptions where people had decided what was happening without checking the facts. So I’m late posting, but it is still Wednesday somewhere, right? And keep right on adding those excerpts, folks. People look at these pages right the way through the week.

Wrongful assumptions, or diverse assumption, can be a useful plot hinge. Have your characters gone off in different directions or locked horns because of assumptions? Mine have. I haven’t yet written the major incorrect assumption that my heroine Sophia has about my hero James (that he is courting her sister), but Embracing Prudence is full of assumptions, Never Kiss a Toad has quite a few, and here’s one from A Raging Madness.

“Lady Melville keeps very little in her room,” he commented.

The maid frowned, and moved closer to him, lowering her voice to a thread above a whisper. “Miss Kerridge packed it all away. Said the lady did not need any of it and might use it to harm herself. They could have left the poor lady with her father’s picture. And the toy Sir Gervase bought for the baby. It was soft. She couldn’t hurt herself with a stuffed cloth cat.”

A baby? Ella had said nothing about a child.

“Perhaps they thought the child should have his father’s gift? Or hers. A boy or a girl?” Not that it mattered.

But the maid was shaking her head. “Poor little mite. It died. It was terrible.” Her eyes gleamed with the pleasure of a dreadful story. “The master was dead, and the old mistress had taken to her bed with a seizure (she was never the same again, poor lady) and my lady slipped on the ice. The fall started the baby coming. But it was not the right time, and the wee one was not lying right in the womb. She had it powerful bad.”

“The baby was born dead?” Dear God.

“Not then, sir. First Mr and Mrs Braxton arrived, and then the baby was born, and we were that pleased, and then the mistress was sick, and the baby, he just died in his sleep, poor little lamb. She looked fit to be buried herself, poor lady, but she got up from her bed and started nursing old Lady Melville, and she nursed her ever since, these three years till a month gone.”

Three years. Three years ago, Braxton had come to London to collect the body of his younger half-brother. He had said that Ella had refused to come with him—that she had social engagements she would not leave for a husband she did not want. And Alex had believed him. When he travelled down here for the funeral, he had made his contempt clear to a pale and silent Ella. How had he not seen that she was ill and grieving?

 

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Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry – emotional scenes on WIP Wednesday

Never Kiss a Toad is set at the beginning of the Railway Age

Never Kiss a Toad is set at the beginning of the Railway Age

It’s our job to pull our readers out of their world and into the one we’ve created: to, as I say above, thrill, intrigue, and delight. In this week’s work in progress Wednesday, your challenge is to find me a scene that provokes a strong emotion in your readers: laughter, sorrow, fear. You choose.

I’ve chosen one from Never Kiss a Toad. This is a tender moment between Sally and her father, one that ends all too soon. Does it work?

“Can you spare a minute for your Papa, Sally?” he asked.

“Of course.” She followed him through to his study.

“You always seem to be hurrying somewhere, sweetheart,” he said. “I miss having my little princess curled up in a chair in my study, keeping me company.”

It was true, she realised. Before her debut, she had sought her father out whenever she could escape the schoolroom. Since she came out… “I have so much on, Papa,” she said. But it was Toad’s exile that came between them, even more since her father began believing lies about him. They were lies. They had to be lies.

Papa smiled, sadly. When had the last of his hair faded to grey? “I know, my love. You are very popular. If a sennight goes by and I do not receive an application for your hand, I know to expect two the following week. Am I to expect a visit from Lord Elfingham? He would make a fine husband, Sally.”

She suppressed a surge of fury. Papa should know that she waited for one proposal, and one only. Would he even tell her if it came? No. That was unfair. Papa had said from the beginning that he would not choose her husband, but would allow her to make the decision.

“He will make Henry a fine husband, Papa, when her mourning is over. If she will accept him. She has this notion that she is not fit to be a duchess because of her mother’s… Um.” Oh dear. She had not meant to discuss that with Papa of all people.

“Henrietta, is it? I hoped it was you, Sally.”

“We decided early on that we would not suit, Papa. It has always been Henry for Elf.” And Toad for Sally.

“You shall be nineteen soon, sweetheart. What would you like for your birthday?”

“Toad to be allowed home.” She had not meant to say that out loud. Her father flinched as if she had hit him, and his eyes, before he hid them by turning away, were pools of pain.

“I know you miss your childhood friend, my darling, but he… He is not as you remember him. If he came back you would suffer for it, and neither his parents or yours are prepared to risk that.”

“You say that, Papa, but you will not tell me how he has changed. You won’t give me any real reasons. And I do not believe it, Papa. Someone has been telling you lies. I know him, and I know you are wrong.”

He had his face shuttered again when he turned back to her, the cold ducal mien that she never used to see before the day it all changed. “You must trust that we know what is best for you, Sarah.

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First kisses on WIP Wednesday

Today, I’m featuring first kisses. With four works-in-progress underway at the same time, I have a few to choose from. Two of them are not at all far along, but I was in a party on Facebook where kisses were the theme of the day, so I wrote a kiss scene for each.

Below is the first kiss between Alex Redepenning and Ella Melville, hero and heroine of A Raging Madness, the second Golden Redepenning book. How about showing me yours?

In A Raging Madness, Alex Redepenning is rescuing the widow Eleanor Melville from her scheming relatives. Alex and Ella are fighting the attraction between them. I haven’t yet written as far as their first kiss, but I’m guessing it is going to go something like this:

“How is your leg?” she said, doing a creditable job of keeping her voice steady. Alex could not be so calm. He had nearly lost her!

She knelt beside him looking anxiously at the pernicious limb. To hell with the leg. “Ella!” She turned her head to meet his eyes. He said it again, his voice breaking. “Ella.”

Her eyes full of wonder, she lifted her hand to touch his face, and he noticed the holes in the crown of her hat.

“Your hat!” he managed. She untied and unpinned it; removed it and poked a finger into one hole and then the other.

“The bullet went through my hat!” She sounded surprised, but not alarmed.

“Too close.” Unable to bear the distance, he tugged her into his arms. “Too close, Ella.” He folded her close and tucked his face into her hair.

She pulled back, warning him, “Alex, be careful of your leg!” Her face turned up to him tempted him beyond measure, and he covered her mouth with his, the thwarted desire of a decade or more released by the fear of the last half hour.

Damn the leg, he would have said, but her mouth had risen to meet his, and he had no breath for speech; no mind with which to think. In all the universe, there was only Ella.

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Backstory on WIP Wednesday

mourning-picture-watercolor-and-gouache-on-silk-1810-nh-metpWe writers know a whole heap of stuff about our characters that never makes it into the final novel. We call it backstory, and every rounded character has one. The art is to trickle out just the facts the reader needs without making it boring, while hinting at further depth underneath.

So this week on WIP Wednesday, show me your backstory. It could be a scene that you have decided not to use, or it could be the trickle of facts that will probably make it all the way through to the final draft.

Whether the passage that follows will survive editing I don’t know. It’s the first few paragraphs of A Raging Madness, and I wrote them yesterday.

The funeral of the dowager Lady Melville was poorly attended—just the rector, one or two local gentry, her stepson Edwin Braxton accompanied by a man who was surely a lawyer, and a handful of villagers.

Alex Redepenning was glad he had made the effort to come out of his way when he saw the death notice. He and Gervase Melville had not been close, but they had been comrades: had fought together in Egypt, Italy, and the Caribbean.

Melville’s widow was not at the funeral, but Alex expected to see her when he went back to the house. Over the meagre offering set out in the drawing room, he asked Melville’s half brother where she was.

“Poor Eleanor.” Braxton had a way of gnashing his teeth at the end of each phrase, as if he needed to snip the words off before he could stop chewing them.

“She has never been strong, of course, and Mother Melville’s death has quite overset her.” Braxton tapped his head significantly.

Ella? Not strong? She had been her doctor father’s assistant in situations that would drive most men into a screaming decline. She had followed the army all her life until Melville sent her home—ostensibly for her health, but really because she took loud and potentially uncomfortable exception to his appetite for whores. Alex smiled as he remembered the effects of stew laced with a potent purge.

Melville swore Ella had been trying to poison him. She assured the commander that if she wanted him poisoned he would be dead, and perhaps the watering of his bowels was the result of a guilty conscience. Ella was the closest to a physician the company had since her father died. The commander found Ella innocent.

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Partings on WIP Wednesday

This week on work-in-progress Wednesday, I’m inviting you to post about partings. Do your characters leave a lover, a friend, a relative, an enemy? Do they part for an hour, a day, a month, forever? Show me what you’ve got.

(The video clip is the wrong period, but the right mood for my excerpt, which is below.)

In my current work in progress, the hero and heroine both work, and their commitments take them in different directions several times in the course of the novel. I like this parting.

Gren kept up a light patter of social conversation over the meal, and Prue made a valiant effort to contribute, though she was dreading the coming parting, and kept lapsing into silence to just watch David and soak up her last moments with him.

He was quiet, too, and Charrie oscillated from bright and bubbly to morose and silent. Without Gren, it would have been a dismal meal.

When the men got up to leave, Gren suggested to Charrie, “Shall we leave them the breakfast room for a moment, Charity? I know my brother wants to kiss her goodbye, and he doesn’t want to embarrass her in front of her sister.”

Charrie looked from one of the men to the other. “You are brothers?”

“Half brothers,” David confirmed.

Charrie opened her mouth, thought better of whatever she was about to say, and shut it again. Without another word, she left the room, Gren trailing in her wake.”

As soon as the door closed behind them, Prue walked into David’s arms.

“Travel safely,” she said.

“I’ll call for you on my way back.”

“No; I doubt I’ll stay long. I will go back to London. Come to me there.”

“Stay at my place, Prue. Mrs Allen knows to welcome you and make you comfortable. Treat it like your own home.”

“I will. I would like to.”

They kissed, and it was a hello and a farewell all at once. This one kiss would have to sustain them for a month or more. It lasted an eternity and was over too soon.

“I do not want to leave you,” David said at last, drawing his head back but keeping her locked in his arms.

“I do not want you to go. But we each have our duties. Go, David. Finish your enquiries and come home to me.”

David smiled, more a warmth in the eyes than a movement of the lips. “Home. Home is wherever   you are, Prue.” He kissed her again, a gentle benediction, then stepped away and opened the door.

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Secondary characters on WIP Wednesday

He’s doing it again, and I refuse to let him have another blog post. I always intended some of my characters to play a role in a number of books — either always as secondary characters, or in lesser roles when they weren’t taking centre stage. But the Marquis of Aldridge is trying to horn in on Prue and David’s love story. I’m not going to talk about him. Or his mother, who also

Lord Jonathan Grenford

Lord Jonathan Grenford

pops up in places that are not always convenient.

But I am going to give you an excerpt with another secondary character for Embracing Prudence. Please show me yours? Usual rules. Nine to ten lines, and I’m not too strict about it. And share away on Facebook and Twitter as much as you please!

So here is Aldridge’s younger brother, Lord Jonathan Grenford, joyously helping his half-brother David with the murder investigation. He has just been to try his charm on the Earl of Selby’s mother and aunt, and is reporting that they all but threw him out.

After that, the two women cut the visit short. Gren was escorted firmly to the door, and Miss Remington informed him that she would be speaking to his mother, a threat that Gren found highly amusing.

“Mama, if she even receives the woman, will inform her that it is about time I had a hobby.”

But Gren’s report was not over.

“So I wandered around to the kitchen entrance, to thank the cook for her particularly delicious almond macaroons. And she insisted on making me a cup of tea and serving me some more. I will need to visit Mama.” He had a bite of his bun while his listeners pondered the non sequitur.

Prue decided to give him the satisfaction of asking. “Very well, Gren. Why do you need to visit Her Grace?”

“I might have promised to the cook a position  in one of Mama’s houses,” Gren’s eyes were dancing. “She isn’t very happy in the Selby household. Not only are they unappreciative of her talents, the whole household knows that they don’t have a feather to fly with and expect to be jobless at any time, and—besides—she is almost certain that one or both of the old harridans greased the steps that the former Earl of Selby slipped to his death on.”

Satisfied with his verbal bombshell, he finished the bun.

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Beginnings in WIP Wednesday

I’m toying with beginnings for the next two projects as I come to the end of the first draft of Embracing Prudence. The Bluestocking and the Barbarian begins with my hero in a family group riding hell for leather for London, mourning-1810-cropheading for his grandfather’s death bed. He needs to do some fancy trick riding to scoop up a child from the middle of the road and return it to the lady at the gates of the orphanage where the child belongs.

A Raging Madness begins in one of three places: at the funeral of the mother of a deceased fellow officer of Alex Redepenning, in the home of the bereaved daughter-in-law, where she hears her relatives plan to put her in Bedlam, or in Alex’s hotel bedroom when she flees to him to ask for help.

How about giving me up a few lines of beginning? The first chapter, if you will, or any other chapter if you prefer. And don’t forget to share!

1819_society_ballHere are the first few lines of Embracing Prudence.

From within the protective camouflage of the gaggle of companions, Prudence Virtue watched her sometime partner and one-night-only lover drift around the banquet hall. No-one else noticed him. Like the shadow he named himself for, he skirted the edges of the pools of candle light, but even when his self-appointed duties moved him close to a group of guests, they looked right past him. None of the privileged, not even the host and hostess, noticed one extra footman.

He was very good. He had the walk, the submissive bend of the head, the lowered eyes. She had overlooked him herself for the first half hour that she sat here, just one more brown-clad, unimpressive companion among a dozen others, waiting patiently in an alcove for the commands of an employer.

But Prue’s body was wiser than her mind, and left her restless in his presence until her eyes caught so many times on this one footman among all the others she began to take notice.

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Curious facts on WIP Wednesday

LiverpoolAuthors often joke about how a law enforcement agency might react to their Internet search history. We need all kinds of curious facts and odd pieces of knowledge to give strength and depth to our plots, and make them accurate. Even writers who set their stories in a totally imaginary world of fantasy or science fiction need their creations to be believable, and historical fiction writers spend huge amounts of time checking the details of background, custom, clothing, manners, and history so that they don’t make errors that will throw a knowledgeable reader out of the story.

Some of it makes its way into the story. Some of it never does. I spent three days this month researching historical Liverpool for the two chapters where David and Gren pursue investigations in that city, and barely any of it actually appears on the page. Sigh. And a further hour’s research into canals just confirmed that a single sentence was historically possible.

Today, on work-in-progress Wednesday, I’m asking you to post about a curious fact or an interesting piece of research, and show us an excerpt in which you used (or didn’t use but were aware of) that information.

Mine is from Embracing Prudence and is the only place my Liverpool research provide context and texture to the story.

Liverpool was large and busy and smelly. England’s second biggest port, dominating Bristol and rivalling even London, its docks were a forest of ships’ masts and spars surrounded by a cacophony of loading and unloading that began at first light and continued until it was too dark to see.

“Abolition will hit them hard,” Gren observed, as they strolled to the offices of the man they had come to see.

“Disgusting trade,” David observed. Liverpool had built its wealth on the Triangle Trade: cheap manufactured goods and guns from its hinterland to Africa, to be traded to chiefs for the live bodies of their enemies. Men, women, and children across the Atlantic to the islands of the Carribean, to be traded for sugar and cotton and other tropical products. Sugar and cotton back across to Liverpool, to be fed into the manufactories that supplied the United Kingdom and beyond.

But even in Liverpool, hard though many had argued the economic costs of stopping the trade, support for abolition had grown these last twenty-five years. The Abolition Bill currently before Parliament was in its final readings, and likely this time to pass where so many had failed. Had some of the local merchants seen the signs of the times and decided to diversify? And applied the same ruthless disregard for human life to the fur trade?

They climbed the stairs to the offices in a substantial building off one of the main thoroughfares leading up from the river. Atkins had a sign on the door saying ‘Thos. Atkins, Discreet Enquiries’, and two clerks in the outer office.

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Descriptions in WIP Wednesday

The-Egyptian-room-drawingI’ve spent a large part of my adult working life in commercial writing, creating and editing legal, government, financial, and business documents. When I decided to commit to writing fiction again, I was concerned that the pared back, plain language style I had cultivated so assiduously would bleed over. Could I write a description? Could I transport my readers into another place; cause them to build pictures in their mind of rooms and landscapes and people? I worried.

I find that if I strongly visualise something myself, then simply describe it as clearly as possible, it seems to work. And so I go looking for visual inspiration, much of which finds a home on my Pinterest pages.

Below is a description from Embracing Prudence. David is calling on a client. As always, I invite you to post excerpts from your work in the comments, and to share through twitter, facebook, or wherever else you like.

David was shown through a lofty hall by an equally lofty butler, and into a parlour decorated in the Egyptian style. Last month, he had met Rede at the solicitor’s office and then had tea with him at his club, so missing the glory of the former Earl of Chirbury’s decorating style.

The room had been painted black to above head height, with gold detailing. Above that was a frieze easily two feet high; Egyptian pharaohs, slaves, mummies, soldiers, and gods painted in garish colours marching endlessly around the room, with a sublime disregard for any kind of sense or story.

The furniture carried on the theme, with blocky claw-footed pieces upholstered or painted in reds, greens and golds. Every surface, including a couple of ornately painted plinths, carried more Egyptian-inspired decoration: sphinxes, pharaohs’ heads, vases, mirrors in frames; even the candle sconces were sphinxes with holders embedded in their heads.

The door opened behind him; heavier steps than the butler’s.

“It’s ghastly, isn’t it?”