Pause your busy Monday for a couple of minutes and try this little imagination exercise. Click play on the video below. Then close your eyes and see if you can imagine yourself travelling in a carriage with the light filtering in through the window.
Briancrainfan. “Brian Crain – Softness and Light.” YouTube. YouTube, 07 June 2012. Web. 15 July 2017.
Were you able to see it? Isn’t this song perfect for a carriage ride on a sunny spring day? I found it to be.
In fact, it is this song and that exercise that I used to settle my brain into one of my writing sessions this week which resulted in the carriage ride shared in the excerpt at the end of this writing news update.
This week, I began working my way through my first round of edits for Henry’s story. I am just past the halfway point with that, and I am still loving that story! I hope to have my edits done before Wednesday this week so I can send that story off to my first reader. Because I am pushing to get that done, my writing sessions were shorter this past week.
As I mentioned last week, I was in need of a new story to write this week and had several options from which to choose. Well, I settled on one that I had attempted before and had given up on.
I’m not the sort that likes to give up. 😉 So, I am giving it one more shot — and so far, it seems like it is going to work. I wrestled with it for a day and then decided to discuss my concerns with a couple of writer friends. That was an excellent choice because a couple of helpful comments was all it took for me to have a lightbulb moment about how this story might be accomplished. We’ll see if it works out.
The story has a working title but as I am still very uncertain if that title will stick, I will just refer to it as Dash of Darcy 4 because it will be the fourth Dash of Darcy Collection Novella. (And if all goes according to plan, there will be at least one sequel and maybe two sequels to add to my Dash of Darcy Companion Stories Collection.)
As with all my Dash of Darcy novellas, the story departs from Pride and Prejudice at a specific point and then follows a new path to happily ever after for Darcy and Elizabeth. This story starts at the conclusion of Darcy’s disastrous proposal — before he can even leave the parsonage — and takes a one hundred eighty degree turn.
This novella is a reworking of three short stories I wrote several years ago. These stories — A Change of Heart, Just Three Words, and With My Whole Heart — can be found in their original forms in my short stories collection HERE. I can’t promise that all of what you read in these stories will end up in the final product as the story has to be expanded and some ideas might not work with the new plot additions, but these three stories are my starting point.
The following scene (currently the beginning of chapter 3) is entirely new material that I am adding to this story and follows the rewritten A Change of Heart (which has been expanded enough to be chapters 1 & 2).
EXCERPT FROM Dash of Darcy 4: Continue reading Music Monday: Softness and Light, Brian Crain