Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Soundtrack for a Story: Corral Nocturne

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After a hectic spring, I decided I didn’t feel like taking on a summer writing challenge, like Camp NaNoWriMo or Actually Finishing Something [in] July, as much fun as they would have been in other circumstances. I’m just not up to pressure, especially self-pressure (which is one of my weaknesses anyway). Anyway, I spent a little while waffling between three different projects, and I’ve finally decided to re-edit Corral Nocturne, my last year’s project from Actually Finishing Something. I’d had vague ideas about editing it for a while. But reading Five Glass Slippers (which was excellent, by the way; my review here) gave me some much clearer ideas about what it was lacking and how I might improve it.

There’s definitely a distinct musical mood to this story, so once again I have a small playlist that I listen to when I need to get in the mood for working on it. I thought it’d be fun to share it the way I did for The Summer Country. You’ll notice there’s much more of a thematic connection between music and story this time. One piece, obviously, provided both mood and a title. The first and last tunes are featured in the story itself; “Cathy’s Theme” is the only one that really has no connection beyond being gorgeously romantic:

Summer Reading 2014

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Spring has not been a very good reading season for me—at least in numbers of books read, and time to read them. I have read some excellent books this year, but mainly before the Great House Painting Adventure began. All through the reading drought that that has caused, I’ve been looking forward to the summer months when I can simply relax and sit out on the pool deck with a good book—or even better, a pile of good books. I’ve consoled myself in the meantime by putting together a good summer reading list. This is almost certainly not all I’ll read this summer; I always end up flying through these lists faster than expected. But these are the books I especially want to read:

This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Pastoral by Nevil Shute
The Shadow Things by Jennifer Freitag
Until That Distant Day by Jill Stengl
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Miss Elizabeth Bennet: A Play From Pride and Prejudice by A.A. Milne
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris
The Third Man by Grahame Green
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
National Avenue by Booth Tarkington
Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay
Aunt Huldah: Proprietor of the Wagon-Tire House and Genial Philosopher of the Cattle Country by Grace McGowan Cooke and Alice McGowan
High, Wide and Lonesome: Growing Up on the Colorado Frontier by Hal Borland
[Edited later to add links to my reviews]

Wonder of wonders, there are actually five books on this list that were published in my own lifetime—three of them brand new releases. I must be broadening my horizons a bit. I may actually be able to vote in the Goodreads Choice Awards this year!

Left-Hand Kelly: A Long, Long Trail

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The release of my next book, Left-Hand Kelly, is fast approaching. A cover is in the works, and most of the other prep work is already complete—basically just final proofreads remain.

This has been one slow-cooked little novella. Though shy of 40,000 words, it has taken several years from initial idea to completion. But I had no idea just how long it had been in the works until the other day, when I got out my old journals and began flipping back through them, looking for the earliest entries relating to Left-Hand Kelly. The more pages I turned back, amazement began to dawn on me. Wait, when was this? Mentions of Left-Hand Kelly as an incomplete project were sandwiched in among notes about working on the earliest stories for The Ranch Next Door and Other Stories. Way back before I’d decided to collect them, in fact, and was still unsuccessfully trying to find professional short story markets. A reference to “the first three chapters” of Left-Hand Kelly having been written some time ago predates my first published story “Disturbing the Peace” placing in a contest in December of 2010. Shortly before that is a big gap in my journal entries—I was not a good diarist back then—so I couldn’t find a mention of beginning the book, but I did have my dated first-draft manuscript in a notebook. I pulled it out and looked at it.

June 19th, 2010.

Four years ago! Almost exactly four years from first draft to publication.

It goes without saying that I was not working on it continuously all that time. I’d write a few chapters, get stuck, put it away for months, and then come back to it later. It held enough interest and promise for me that I did keep coming back. “It appeals to me because there’s a tremendous amount of emotion packed into a pretty brief plot,” I wrote in that earliest journal entry. As near as I can figure, from margin dates and journal entries, I wrote the first three chapters in the summer of 2010, chapter four and part of chapter five that December, the rest of five through seven in April and May 2012, and then finally picked it up again in late January 2013 and finished the eight remaining chapters in February. Various rounds of edits have taken place since then.

What amazes me is that around the same time I was writing those first three chapters, I was also turning out some horribly amateurish stuff that will probably never see the light of day. Yet the beginning of Left-Hand Kelly, with only reasonable editing, was good enough to keep me coming back to it and blends well with the later parts of the book. Don’t ask me how that came about. All I know is, it makes me feel a lot better about the sheaf of unfinished projects that I still believe hold promise. It may take years, but one day they’ll get there.