I finished the first draft of Lost Lake House yesterday! I know it’s going to need revision, but I’m pretty happy with it nonetheless. It was a story where I thought I had everything pretty well mapped out beforehand, but once I began writing, I started discovering unexpected depths to the characters and realizing that certain aspects would need to be fleshed out better. A lot of that is what I’ll be dealing with when it comes time to edit. But in the meantime, here’s some snippets! I’ve also shared a few bits on Twitter throughout the writing process: here, here and here.

She rounded a turn and twenty incarnations of her own tense white face flashed upon her view. It was a long, curving hall, dropping down one step at intervals toward the nether regions of the building, perhaps the kitchens—but even here the décor was grand; the walls were lined with gold-framed mirrors, hung in a row like ancestral portraits, but empty until filled by the reflection of whoever stepped into the hall.

Maurice Vernon was here with three or four other men gathered around him—standing with his well-shod feet apart and looking, as always, ready to figure prominently in a newspaper photograph.

The rooms all had that empty, littered look that any place has the day after a party, only with the Lost Lake House this was its condition every morning. The men’s boots clumped on the polished marble floor without the least consideration of its expensiveness; one man pinched out the stub of his cigarette and tossed it in a corner.

She was playing with fire and she knew it—but almost her whole life was playing with fire now, so what difference did a few more sparks make?

Marshall produced the ring of keys from his pocket again and jingled them before her. “Boathouse, tool shed, and three doors in the grounds. They’ve got the Lake House monogram on them.”

“Of course!—Golly, that was short-sighted, wasn’t it.”

Marshall grinned slightly for the first time. “The monogram, or trusting ’em to me?”

The rowboat moved swiftly, cutting a glittering, washing wake through the light cast on the lake from the windows of the Lake House. And there was a paler light around them now, too, that broke into ripples on the surface of the water—Dorothy realized that it was moonlight.