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.”

News: I finished the first rough draft of Land of Hills and Valleys this week.

Also: it’s a mess. But I’ll fix it.

Seriously, though, after having had such a hard time with writing this winter, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the notion that I actually finished a manuscript. And the good news is, I’ve been having ideas as I go along for things that need to be changed and jotting down notes to that effect—so hopefully I shouldn’t get too stuck anywhere in the second draft.

Since the second half of the manuscript is equal parts (A) spoilers and (B) a mess…as I think I mentioned earlier…I couldn’t find too many shareable snippets; but here’s the few that I came up with:

The room quieted a little, and I heard the subdued rustle of everyone leaning forward to look past their neighbor or stretching to see over the heads in front of them. I felt the suffocating sense of shame for him, felt the desire to melt into the floor as strongly as if all the eyes had been focused on me instead.

*

Robert Herrington had patted my hand and told me not to distress myself overmuch; Carol had practically squeezed the blood from my fingers and told me not to be an idiot; if I adopted a point of view somewhere about the middle I ought to be all right.

*

The full realization of the fact seemed to go through me for the first time like a cold breath of wind, and my lips felt numb for a second. “Or did you know that already? Did they report to you?”

An eyebrow went up at that, but still his reaction wasn’t one of either alarm or violence. He only came a little closer to me and peered straight into my eyes for a minute as if to be sure I wasn’t suffering from shock or fever or something else unbalancing.

*

Tony was still muttering under his breath, things I wouldn’t repeat but had to agree with.

*

Here under the canopy of trees it was almost dark, but we were sheltered from the rain, with only an occasional splat of water from a branch hitting the windshield. Tim guided the truck around a climbing hairpin bend, the noisy engine sounding like it was laboring at the elevation, and then pressed his foot on the accelerator up the length of a straight slope. At the top of the incline he turned off from the last vestiges of the petering-out track, threading a gap between two tree trunks. The truck tires clawed at the long wet grass and we skidded a little, and I sat up straight on the edge of my seat as if that would help keep our balance.

as they say, to be continued…

The concept of Land of Hills and Valleys, a murder mystery set in 1930s Wyoming, goes back to 2009, when I won that year’s NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words of an incomplete version under a different title. That original version was so juvenile that it’s embarrassing to even look at my early notes now, but I always did feel there was a germ of something good in the mystery plot. Over the ensuing years I re-outlined it several times, added some twists to the plot and even changed the culprit more than once, but never got it any further off the ground than that. Something was just lacking.

Then, last summer, I had a moment of inspiration—to try writing it in the first person. I totally scrapped the early drafts and started from scratch again, and found that the new narration not only worked, it gave the story the spark of life it had been missing. Now it’s a bit like a Mary Stewart romantic-suspense novel meets the setting and mood of Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka.

I’ve reached the halfway point of my rough draft, which seemed like a good time to share a few snippets. Here’s a sampling, all from the first half of the book:

We turned into a stretch of woods, on ground rising to the north—first a fairylike grove of wind-rustled aspens, and then higher up as the rocks broke more and more from the moss-carpeted soil, dark, close-ranked, rich-scented pines, their gnarled roots crawling over and winding between the blocks of granite. I held unashamedly to the saddle horn as our horses climbed, and ducked the prickly evergreen branches that swept across the narrow trail we followed.

*

I said nothing, but pressed my lips in a straight line and fixed my eyes on the third button of his frayed denim coat. I’d said I wasn’t a little girl, but I felt like an obstinate child whose only weapon is silence.

Sutherland’s harsh laugh grated on my very skin. “Have it your way, Lena. I’ll be seeing you.”

*

My door had a lock that could be turned from inside, but it was stiff and creaky and I wasn’t even sure I could make it turn all the way. Even if I could, it would make more noise than anything in the house. I stood there in my nightgown with my ear close to the crack of the door, cold toes curled on the bare floor.

*

We trailed at a leisurely pace past shorn hayfields, swaying goldenrod with mottled leaves shedding a mellow spicy scent in the sunshine, and occasional wind-whipped cottonwoods beginning to scatter their leaves. There was next to no traffic on the dirt roads—only twice did we meet an automobile churning through the dust, which honked and slowed as the boys parted the cattle and then nosed its way slowly through the herd. I waved to the drivers as they picked up speed again on the other side, and the plodding Herefords closed over the road again like a slow-moving Red Sea.

*

She must have seen I looked shocked, for she added more temperately, “Don’t think I’m excusing murder, because I’m not, by any means. Nor saying the truth ought to be buried. All I want to say is, there’s no need for you to waste your pity on him.”

*

The world turned upside-down and hit me hard, and I lay gasping for breath, flat on my back in the ditch with the cheery blue and white of sky and floating clouds high above me. I stared at the clouds and fought for breath, with a kind of incredulity.

*

There was a shoebox on the floor almost out of sight beneath the hem of the dress, and it it were a little embroidered purse with a broken clasp, a wide tortoiseshell comb such as girls used to put up their back hair in my mother’s day, and a couple of ribbons. It was almost more than I could bear. Why hadn’t he written? Why hadn’t he set things right between them, or at least tried?

 

Well, what do you think? Would you want to hear more of this story?