Novelettes – Leenie Brown

A Meeting by the Stile (Heywood Hardy)

Isn’t this a beautiful picture. I love this artist’s painting of horses and people. I could sit and look at them, admiring the details and dreaming up stories, for quite some time. 🙂

I thought that the name of this painting made it perfect to pair with the first chapter of Two Days in November since there is a gentleman on horseback and a meeting at a stile.

Two Days in November is a story that takes place over two days in November. They are the days after Jane and Elizabeth have left Netherfield, when Collins comes to Longbourn, and when Darcy and Elizabeth meet on the street in Meryton.

But it is Darcy’s discovering Elizabeth at the stile and hearing her sister’s tragic story of a love that was lost which turns his mind in a better direction than it was set upon going. I hope you enjoy reading about how this meeting at the stile begins. (It doesn’t finish until the end of chapter 2. 🙂 )

Enjoy!

PS. If you wish to read the full novelette, you can purchase a copy of it at your favourite retailer, or you can follow me on reamstories.com/leeniebrown or patreon.com/LeenieBrown and read it for free this month.

Archers (after a drawing by Adam Buck)

“Archers”, an April 1799 “pin-up” type print, engraved after a drawing by Adam Buck, and with a dedication to the Prince Regent. At the time, archery was one of the few competitive sports that adult women of the “genteel” classes could respectably engage in (others were battledore/shuttlecock — a precursor to badminton — and for a tiny social elite, old-fashioned “court tennis”). Engraved after a drawing by Adam Buck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Do you know what was one of my most favourite times of the day back when I was in elementary school? No, it wasn’t recess or lunch. It was when we would come in from lunch recess and our teacher would read a chapter or two from a book while we settled back into our desks and got our minds ready to finish our classes.

When I was teaching, reading to my class, like my teachers had done, was one of the things I loved to do.

With that in mind, let me tell you that I have been working on a reading project which taps into memories of that loved activity from years gone by. It’s a project that I have wanted to do for some time, but then, right after I began it, I got long covid and had to abandon it for a while.

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. 🙂

Austen Couples – I Knew I Loved You (Savage Garden)

A new month = a new music theme on Mondays. 🙂 For the month of April, all the music videos will be fan-created music homages to stories that have been put on film or were written for film. We’re starting with a montage of Austen characters. Therefore, I picked a line from a story of mine which pairs the same characters as Austen did in her work.

My choices were Darcy and Lizzy, Jane and Bingley, Lydia and Wickham, Marrianne and Colonel Brandon. I chose…

These four lines are from a novelette I wrote called Morning Mist which began with the questions: “What if Marianne met the colonel before she met Willoughby and what if the setting where they met played into Marianne’s love of the romantic?” The lines above are from that first meeting in a misty meadow one morning.

Morning Mist is currently only available in the anthology Thunder, Mist, and Frost. However, I have been contemplating breaking the anthology apart and making each title available separately, and I think this might happen later this year since it would give readers more options.

MAILING LIST PATREON