As writers everywhere are plunging into the race of NaNoWriMo, I am sitting back and taking a short breather after having just wound up a race of my own. I wanted to finish typing the second draft of Land of Hills and Valleys by the end of October—and I finished on November 1st, which is close enough for me. It’s a bit more ragged in places than I had expected, so it’ll require some more work before I’m ready to hand it over to beta-readers; but I want to let it sit for at least a few weeks before I look at it again.
I have another project in line that I’m looking forward to starting soon—a novella—of which more in a future post. But this week I’ve taken to just rest, breathe, and catch up on a few little household tasks I kept putting off until I met my self-imposed deadline.
Meanwhile, snippets! Here’s a few short excerpts from the second half of the book:
“How do you know so well what they thought?” I said, feeling again that unhappy prickling of resentment at the differences in how much we knew. Why her and not me? When I’d thought they all liked me and meant well towards me?
“Oh, things get around. In a place like this they always do. Tony Gleason’s not the most discreet person alive, you know, even though he was always on Ray’s side.”
*
By the time we got back to the courthouse it was dusk. The sky above the buildings in the cul-de-sac was pale, and there was a burnt-orange glow along the horizon in the west. The street lamps had come on, shedding small circles of glare over the dusty hoods of automobiles parked bumper to bumper along the curb.
*
“Oh, let him do what he wants!” I said sharply. “It’s certainly better than anything you people achieved by looking the other way and keeping your mouths shut because you were afraid of whose toes you might step on.”
In the utter silence that followed—Carol being flabbergasted, I imagine—I realized that Carleton Kent’s eyes had fastened on my left hand. I wanted to move it, to drop it out of sight in my lap, but I couldn’t bring myself to such an obvious action…even though I knew, once a few seconds had passed, that Carol must have seen what he was looking at too.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Kent quietly. He got up from his stool, reached in his coat pocket for a dollar and put it on the counter, and walked out of the dining-room.
*
The first rider wore no slicker, and his clothes were soaked and dark. Tim’s face was set like a flint, as he drove the other ahead of him—had he had a gun with him all that time, since we left the house? The other man’s shoulders were slumped; he was leaning over sideways in the saddle with what might have been drunkenness or exhaustion, or abject terror.
“Get down,” said Ray in a hard voice I had seldom heard before, and he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and almost dragged him out of the saddle. The man staggered as his feet touched the ground, as if Ray’s hold on his collar was the only thing keeping him up.
*
“A much simpler way of putting it,” said Mrs. Crawley with some acerbity, “is that a guilty conscience spoils one’s aim.”
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