Christmas 2022 is a matter of history and with New Year’s celebrations coming in a few days, I decided not to tax anyone with anything that might be construed as thought provoking. If you’re like me, the post Christmas let-down has you in cruise control right now and you almost recoil at any task that requires more than a few brain cells to complete. In that vein I present an excerpt from book 5 of my Elizabeth Said, Darcy Said…
Christmas is past and now we move into that week between Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but this has always seemed like a week in limbo to me, with little happening other than waiting for the year to end. I am also not much of a fan of New Year’s, for I have never seen the movement of one year to the next as anything exceptional. Maybe I am a bit of…
Here is the final chapter of our little tale. As always, if you have missed the previous chapters, you can find the story here. I hope you enjoy it. Merry Christmas, everyone! *** Disaster struck on Christmas Eve. Until the moment when it happened, Darcy had been considering what he might do to claim the fair Miss Elizabeth Bennet for himself and foil the odious toad of her cousin, several delightful possibilities flitting through his mind, while ignoring Miss Bingley’s…
This chapter was written amidst the craziness of the holiday season. I have not even done my usual multi-review proofreading (or even a single proofreading), so I apologize! Missed one of the parts? Here’s Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4! Chapter 5 When the day of the Christmas assembly dawned, Elizabeth seriously considered whether to spend most of the day in bed, feigning a headache and avoiding the effusions of the exhausting parson who was the…
I love Christmas. The season seems to bring out the best in just about everyone, from friends and acquaintances ready with friendly greetings and holiday wishes, to strangers who wish you the best of the season while shopping in stores or passing on a busy street. My first Christmas celebration with my wife still ranks as one of our best. She was three weeks away from giving birth to our first child, a son, so we limited the length of…
The last few days of November are upon us and, with Thanksgiving complete, Christmas preparations are taking over. That’s not to say the shops waited until this week to put up their trees and garland. Heaven forbid! Where I live in Canada, the home improvement stores decorated the trees and started playing carols in late September. My thoughts on this are best summed up in the immortal words of Ebenezer Scrooge: Bah, humbug! Don’t misunderstand, I love Christmas and all…
As some of you know, I am in the midst of writing a series titled Elizabeth Said, Darcy Said, where I take well known portions of Ms. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and expand on them. Each book tells the story first from Elizabeth’s perspective, then reexamines it from Darcy’s point of view. The first two novellas told the story of Our Dear Couple’s initial meeting at the Meryton Assembly. Books three and four explore Elizabeth’s introduction to Mr. Wickham in…
I confess. The details in my fiction are open to interpretation by readers, as well as other authors. In my defense, though, my stories are set in a period more than two hundred years in the past, so many of the situations I put my characters into are dreamed up as I write. That is not to say the conversations and actions I thrust these men and women into are made up of whole cloth. Their words and manner of…
As an author who writes historical fiction, I try to write in the common vernacular of the time and place my story is set. There are many tools that help authors to do this, and my experience in writing many books has given me a general sense of what is usable and what is not. For anything of which I am uncertain, I can go to resources on the net that will give me a good idea of whether a…