Austen-Inspired – Page 7

A Travelling Coach and Pair (Henry Bunbury)

Travelling Coach and Pair, Henry Bunbury, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

This drawing is the sort that will make me enlarge the image just to look at all the little lines that comprise the details in it. I also enjoy that it almost looks as if it could be moving.

I chose to share it today because Pretending to Love Mary begins in travelling coach, and I wanted to share the first few paragraphs of that story with you.

If you’re on my mailing list, you may have already read this story because I sent out an email with a link to download a copy yesterday. If you’re a Booksprout reviewer, you might have picked up a copy of the novelette to review. (Twenty out of the thirty-five review copies were claimed the last time I looked.)

If you’d like to join my mailing list, and you do so before March 7th (which is the release day for Pretending to Love Mary, you could also get a copy of this story for free.

If you’d rather just purchase the book, it’s on pre-order now.

With all that said, here’s the beginning of the book to pique your curiosity. 🙂

The High Oxford (Myles Birket Foster)

*A busy day on The High, Oxford with figures and a pony and trap near Queen’s College*. Myles Birket Foster, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Don’t you just love the activity in the street in this painting? I can almost hear the sounds and smell the aromas. The painting gives us a lovely little glimpse of what the daily life in the town of Oxford might have been like years ago.

My book His Sensible Heart, which is book 6 in my Touches of Austen series, is set in the town of Oxford because our hero is attending school there. He’s not been a very diligent student before the book began, but things in his life have changed. His father is no longer pleased to just let him float along in life, doing as he pleases. In fact, his father has cast him aside — all because he chose the wrong lady to fall in love with.

That young lady (a very sensible young miss) and her father (a kindly gentleman) require Miles to prove himself. That will mean applying himself to his studies. His friend Tom, as we can see below, has offered to help Miles learn what needs to be learned to succeed in the challenge set before him.

I’m sharing this particular story excerpt today because I think, like the painting above, it gives a glimpse of who our hero is by showing us a piece of his life in action.

A Cottage in a Cornfield (John Constable)

John Constable, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This painting made me think of Mr. Dobney’s cottage in So Very Unexpected. It is the first place where he and Lydia really meet — even if they had been introduced the day before. Below is how that meeting started. (And it really did not get any better for some time — though eventually, Lydia finds that the fellow who owns the cottage into which she crept when running away has decided to be her friend, a real friend, unlike any she has ever had before.)

Twenty-Two Leenie Titles are FREE on Smashwords…

…and the rest are all 50% off until January 1, 2023

A couple of weeks ago, my catalogue of books (except for the five in Kindle Unlimited) were added to the Smashwords store. I was going to let you know about this new place to find my books in my next Saturday Broadsheet.

But then…

I was asked if I wanted to have ALL of my books and boxsets included in the Smashwords Year End Ebook Sale.

I said, “Yes!” and selected the 50% off option.

This means that all my books priced above $0.99 are half-price from December 15, 2022 to January 1, 2023, and all my books that are priced at $0.99 are reduced to FREE for the same time period.

THIS LINK will take you to my Smashwords Author page that has all my books listed on it.

THIS LINK will just take you to front page of the Year End Promotion so you can search by various genres, price points, and authors.

Here’s one more link that I will mention simply because it is the season for giving.

THIS LINK is all about how to gift ebooks purchased on Smashwords. Maybe you want to give some as gifts, or maybe, you want to share this link and some book titles with those who want to know what you’d like for Christmas. 😉

Happy Reading!

Leenie

The Trouble of a Curricle (and the gentlemen who drive them)

Morburre, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve read Waking to Mr. Darcy, then you know that at the end of that book we discover Mary Bennet has as secret crush. Nicholas Hammond is that crush. He’s also the Bennet’s neighbour, the eldest son of a spendthrift of a father, the older brother to a rather reckless brother, quite practical (perhaps to a fault?), and not uninterested in Mary.

Below is when we first get to meet Nicholas’s brother, Fred, and his friend, Whit. This excerpt tells of just one incident where the two of them cause trouble with a curricle and the first of four times they cause issues through racing.

Despite all that, they are two of my favourite troublemakers. 😉