Today on the blog, we have something special: a stand-alone short story with two characters from the Bluestocking Belles’ holiday box set, Mistletoe, Marriage, and Mayhem. My character Mary meets Susana Ellis’s character Lady Pendleton. The post below tells the scene from the point of view of Mary, the heroine of Gingerbread Bride. Go to Susana’s Parlour to read the same story from the point of view of Lady Pendleton, mother of Julia Tate who is the heroine of The Ultimate Escape.
This week, I’m focusing on villains. On the Teatime Tattler at the weekend, I’m doing a purpose-written duo of vignettes from the point-of-view of my Gingerbread Bride villain from the Bluestocking Belles’ box set, Mistletoe, Marriage, and Mayhem. I’m also writing a cross-blog post with my Belle colleague Amy Rose Bennett (to be published later in the month) with the Gingerbread Bride villainess.
So I’m inviting you all to post an excerpt of around nine sentences showcasing your villain. Here’s Viscount Bosville, in an extract from Gingerbread Bride.
“Watch where you are going, Ma—Cousin Mary? Good God, it is. What are you doing in this godforsaken place?”
Lord Bosville. Of all the people Mary imagined meeting, he was the last she’d expect to find this far from London. “Cousin,” she replied, giving him a frosty nod. They had parted on unfriendly terms, after he had tried to kiss her and she had, as her father had taught her, punched him in a vulnerable part of his anatomy.
Bosville rearranged his face into a friendly smile that did not reach his eyes. “I do apologize for my language, Cousin Mary. I was startled. How nice to see you. Mother will be delighted to hear you are well. She has been so worried.”
What nonsense. Mary suppressed a snort. Worried to have lost Mary’s money, perhaps.
“If you will excuse me, Cousin, my maid and I are tired.”
But Viscount Bosville turned and accompanied them up the stairs, insisting he would see them safely to their rooms.
In three more weeks, my novella Gingerbread Bride will be released as part of the Mistletoe, Marriage, & Mayhem box set from the Bluestocking Belles. So that makes it a work in progress still, does it not? Wending its way towards launch?
So for the next four Wednesdays, expect to see excerpts from this novella. And please show me yours! I’d love to read them. (Don’t forget to share the post so other people can find our pieces too.)
So this week, I’m sharing the moment when my heroine accepts that she is still in love with her girlhood hero. (You might wish to share your hero’s moment of revelation, or even admission of attraction if love isn’t on the table.) My heroine is thinking of all the reasons she is not content:
First, she missed the sea. She had lived her entire life within the sight, smell, and sound of it, until she first came to London, and as each day passed, she yearned for it more and more. The sea was home, and this land-locked valley, however pretty, was not.
Second, no matter how sharply she spoke to herself, she could not stop thinking about Rick Redepenning. She couldn’t possibly miss a man she had spent less than a day with in the past five years. She was merely worried about his injury, that was all, that he might not be taking care, might not be healing. No matter what excuses she made, she was well aware she was in danger of once again falling in love with Rick the Rogue—if, in fact, she’d ever fallen out of love.
I’ve been celebrating some milestones this week: my blog birthday, the ninth month of Candle’s Christmas Chair, and the half-birthday of the Bluestocking Belles.
So I thought for this week’s work-in-progress Wednesday, the theme could be celebrations, parties, or events. Do you have a ball scene? A wedding? A fair? A birthday party? A banquet? Post seven to ten lines, and don’t forget to share!
Mine is from the Christmas party towards the end of Gingerbread Bride in the box set Mistletoe, Marriage, and Mayhem, currently on prelease from the Bluestocking Belles.
The kissing boughs had all been hung, making it perilous to traverse the house and garden. By the time the party started Mary had been kissed at least twenty times, all polite salutes on the cheek.
The party spilled all over the house and beyond: carols around the pianoforte in one of the parlors, silly games in another, a continual feast in the dining room, and dancing outside in the crisp night air. Mary managed to avoid being alone with Rick until almost the end of the evening, when he cornered her in a temporarily deserted parlor, most of the party out on the dance lawn in the garden.
“Mary.” There it was again. Her name, hummed in that beautiful voice of his, sounding like music. She turned her face upwards, tipping her cheek within easy reach, but he curved his neck as he bent, so his lips touched hers.
At the cover reveal party for the Bluestocking Belle box set yesterday, we talked about heroines, and whether people preferred heroines to be rescued or to rescue themselves. Opinions varied, but it set me thinking about moments of danger. My novella for the box set is Gingerbread Bride, and my heroine is a strong-minded and determined young woman. Which doesn’t mean that she is always able to rescue herself!
So, for this week’s work-in-progress Wednesday, please post around seven lines that show your hero or heroine in a tight spot. The danger could be physical or emotional. You could show the rescue or just the crisis. You pick.
To kick us off, here’s mine. Mary is in a post chaise, the horses are bolting, and she has climbed out to see if she can stop them:
As she edged her way cautiously back to the door, a flash of movement behind the hedge to her left caught her eye. A rider? The hedge thickened again, and she couldn’t be sure. Another bounding lurch prompted her to move again, and she swung herself back inside to rejoin Polly—though not without a few extra bruises.
“The post boy is gone, and the horses are bolting,” Mary told Polly. “Stay in your corner and hold on tight. And pray that they run themselves out before we reach a bend in the road.”
Following her own advice meant she couldn’t see whether the glimpse she’d caught was a rider. Someone riding to their aid would be wonderful, but unlikely. Might as well wish for Rick to save her once again!
This last week, I submitted my novella for the Bluestocking Belles’ Christmas anthology. It’s called Gingerbread Bride, and the anthology is Mistletoe, Marriage, and Mayhem.
To celebrate, I’m making Work-in-Progress Wednesday about food. Post seven to eight lines from your work-in-progress with some connection to food (or drink, if your characters don’t eat on stage).
Don’t forget to share on Twitter, Facebook, and your other social media. If you tag me, I’ll like!
Mary smiled with satisfaction as she placed the last of the little gingerbread ladies into the box. In the four weeks she had been at Aunt Dorothy’s, she had learned a number of recipes, and helped with all kinds of baking, but the gingerbread biscuits, which she had learned from the cook on the Olympus, became her specialty…
Aunt Dorothy had round and star cutters, and cutters in the shape of various animals. When the alderman’s daughter asked for gingerbread ladies and gentlemen for her wedding breakfast, Mary had been delighted with the notion, and the cutters the tinker made to her pencil drawings worked very well.
The icing gave them clothes and features; a whole box of little gingerbread grooms, and a box of little gingerbread brides.
And please, do consider joining us for our cover reveal party next week. The @BellesInBlue have great parties!
God thinks I’m hilarious.
Way back in April, when I first thought about pushing the publication of Encouraging Prudence out to October to fit in with Halloween, it seemed like a good idea to write a novella for publishing in late July or early August. After all, otherwise I’d have six months without a new release!
And of course I could write the other novella; the one for the Bluestocking Belles’ Christmas anthology. I even had a title, a hero and heroine, and a vague idea of plot.
Two novellas, right? A Baron for Becky and Gingerbread Bride. And carry on with Encouraging Prudence at the same time. Easy.
And then A Baron for Becky grew. By the time I sent it off to the beta readers, it was 42,500 words. They came back with questions and comments, and I spent two weeks frantically editing and rewriting. I sent it to the editor at just over 50,000 words. My novella was now officially a novel.
I’m not going to walk you through the whole thing. Suffice it to say that Mari has done a developmental editor thing on me that has improved the book out of all sight, robbed us both of sleep, and grown the word count by another 10,000 words.
I’ve also managed to meet my Gingerbread Bride deadline, but Encouraging Prudence has languished. And there isn’t time between now and October to do it justice.
Also, life. Several people dear to me have put the hard word on about overdoing things.
If you’re waiting for David’s and Prue’s story, don’t despair. I’m around half way through and I plan to finish the first draft by the end of September or at the very outside by the end of October. But I’ve just been through my book table changing the dates to be vaguer. It will be published in 2016, and I can’t say more than that.
I’m polishing up some short stories for October, including a prequel for Encouraging Prudence, in which David and Prue are bit players in someone else’s romance. It’s a Gothic murder mystery, which should be fun.
And the Christmas box set is out in November.
Oh dear. That almost sounds like a plan.
Here’s a sneak preview of my Christmas novella, to be published in a Bluestocking Belle box set. Usual disclaimers apply: I’m still writing the first draft, so later ideas might mean rewriting this bit, and it needs editing and proofreading. But I’m loving Mary, and Rick is another nice guy. I do enjoy writing nice guys.
It was Richard Redepenning. What on earth was he doing in a field in Surrey? It was as if her running away conjured him up! She almost smiled as she thought of the number of times he had appeared out of nowhere to rescue her when she was young, and then frowned when she remembered finding out that he had been in London for two months, and hadn’t called on her once.
Today, she was rescuing herself, thank you very much.
Good manners, however, prompted her to say, “I was sorry to hear about your wound. I trust you are recovering?”
He was dismounting, and she could see for herself that the wound had left him lame. His boot hit the ground and he lurched, catching his balance against the saddle. She almost dropped her bags and put out a hand to help him, but she could hear her father’s voice saying ‘let the man keep his pride, child’.
Instead, she put the bags down gently, and surreptitiously eased her shoulders. The bags had not felt nearly as heavy when she strode away from the others at the coach, after a short argument with the coachman about the merits of following the road versus trusting her navigation skills.
The coachman insisted that sticking to the road was a much better idea, since who knew what barriers might appear on the path she could see cutting down the hill. “I know what I’m doing, miss,” he insisted. If he thought that she was going to trust a coachman who had finally ditched them after multiple near misses, he was soon disabused of the notion.
As soon as she struck out on her own, she questioned whether it had been wise. Even the silly coachman would have been protection from the three men who had been leering at her for most of the afternoon. She was, of course, duly grateful to Lieutenant Redepenning for happening along before they caught up with her. But she had a pistol. She would have managed perfectly well had he not happened along.
“I have some rope here,” Lieutenant Redepenning was saying, as he looked through his saddle bags. “Ah. Here it is. Pass me the carpet bag, Miss Pritchard, and we’ll let the horse carry it the rest of the way to the village.”
She rather thought he needed the horse more than the carpet bag did. But arguing with Richard Redepenning had always been an exercise in futility. He was the only person she knew who could outstubborn her. Though that was at least in part because of the pointless tendre she had held for him since the first time he had rescued her.
She had argued with her nurse; the Spanish nurse, or maybe the French one. There had been three in quick succession the year she was nine. She didn’t even remember what the argument was about, but she did remember deciding there was no point in taking an appeal to Papa. Papa would not countenance insubordination within his family any more than within his crew.
Mary, convinced she was right, had taken it into her head to go looking for something. That’s right, apples. They’d fought about apples. She had passed an apple seller in the market earlier in the day, and had asked for an apple for tea. The nurse had told her the country grew no apples, so she had waited till the silly woman went to sleep, then crept out of her cabin and set off to find the market.
Which was not at all where she expected it to be. She soon became lost in a maze of little streets, and her red hair and fair skins attracted a forest of locals, looming over her and making incomprehensible sounds, while she stood at bay against a wall and prepared to fight for her life.
Then the crowd melted and Midshipman Redepenning was there, smiling at her and holding out a hand, while all the time talking to the village people in their own language. At 14, he had been a beautiful boy, tall and slender, with a crop of golden blond hair and intensely blue eyes.
He didn’t growl, or complain about nuisance girl children. He didn’t offer to suggest that her father beat her (not that Papa ever did). He escorted her home to the ship, and helped her sneak back into her cabin. He even took a detour through the market and bought her an apple.
Mary had fallen in love that day, and stayed in love as the boy grew to the handsomest, kindest man she knew. No other man had ever measured up. Not that Lieutenant Redepenning cared. As far as she could see, he still thought of her as the child he kept having to rescue.
“Miss Pritchard?” There was she lost in memories of some far off sunny shore, while Lieutenant Redepenning stood in front of her with his piece of rope at the ready.
“Thank you,” she said, and she hoisted the bag up and balanced it on the saddle while he tied it, with quick efficient sailors’ knots. The band box went up next, tied in front of the bag.
“If you would see to the gate, Miss Pritchard,” he suggested. “I can walk well enough, but I’m not as spry as usual.”
They slowly sauntered down the hill path, Mary holding the proffered arm but attempting to put no weight on it.
Mary’s anxiety made her cross. He really shouldn’t be walking. Idiot man. He should have stuck to riding, and the road. If he was sore tonight, it would be his own fault, not hers. She didn’t ask him to come after her.
They came to another gate, and on the other side a seat that looked over the village, now almost close enough to touch. They were level with the church roof and the top floor of the inn, and looking down on the cottages.
The last stretch of path, though short, was going to a problem. It was steep and narrow. How was Mary going to get the lieutenant down it without injury?