Leenie Brown fell in love with Jane Austen's works when she first read Sense and Sensibility followed immediately by Pride and Prejudice in her early teens. As the second of five daughters and an avid reader, she has always loved to see where her imagination takes her and to play with and write about the characters she meets along the way. In 2013, these two loves collided when she stumbled upon the world of Jane Austen Fan Fiction. A year later, in 2014, she began writing her own Austen-inspired stories and began publishing them in 2015. Leenie lives in Nova Scotia, Canada with her two teenage boys and her very own Mr. Brown (a wonderful mix of all the best of Darcy, Bingley and Edmund with healthy dose of the teasing Mr. Tillney and just a dash of the scolding Mr. Knightley).
John Henry Dolph [Public domain]; via Wikimedia Commons
~*~*~
“Did I tell you I acquired a kitten for Miss Bennet?”
Darcy blinked and looked at Bingley. “You did what?”
“Before I left town, Miss Bennet was telling me about a cat she once had but that had run away during a storm. She seemed to miss it a great deal, so when I arrived, I sought out Sir William and inquired if he knew where I might find a grey tabby cat. As luck would have it, he knew precisely where I might find one.” Bingley lifted the drapes out of the way and scooped up a kitten. “This is Oliver. He has yet to learn not to push vases off tables.”
It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. Today, I’m going to take a little look back at 2018 as we “Let Her Go.” ( 🙂 I do love a good pun!)
Published to YouTube by The Piano Guys on February 19, 2014
It was a busy year!
Let’s begin by looking at the Class of 2018 books. 🙂 I have included the month in which they were published for those who might be curious about that sort of detail.
January
March
April
May
June
October
December
To go with this peek at the Class of 2018, I have created a quick three-question survey. I would love it if you would take a minute and answer these questions. I’ll post the results of the survey next week.
Recently published does not equal 2018 bestseller. The bestsellers for the year are on this graphic. Some of the new releases made the cut, but not all.
Here’s another interesting statistic from the year:
At the time of my writing this post on Saturday, December 29, 2018, my yearly word count total is
327,242 words
But…there is still today, and I am hoping to find time to write a little bit. I did not finish the fourth installment of Loving Lydia on Friday. I only got part way through it before I had to stop for the night. It needs to be done.
Speaking of Loving Lydia, it will be the first Thursday blog story of the year, and it starts posting this Thursday!
In that same vein of thought, you might like to know that Delighting Mrs. Bennet, which is the book that comes right before Loving Lydia in the Marrying Elizabeth series, is scheduled to be published NEXT Thursday, January 10, 2019, and will be the first book published in 2019. Preorder details should be arriving soon, I hope. (I still need to work on a few things for this.)
I am still working on Tom: To Secure His Legacy. This book will be the first book posted on Patreon for 2019 and hopefully, will be the second book published. (Fingers crossed — well, yours not mine. Typing is too difficult when you cross your fingers. LOL)
I have some other plans that I am trying to get nailed down better as this year ends and a new one begins. Hopefully, I will be able to share some of those plans with you in next Monday’s post.
For now, I will leave you with a small excerpt from Tom’s story (which I did not get to write on very much this week due to holidays and my husband being off work).
He was home. Never to leave again. He was exactly where he was meant to be. Here. With her. Until the frost fairies never returned to paint another windowpane in winter. Or perhaps even longer.
[from Frosted Windowpanes, A Touches of Austen Novelette]
Published to YouTube by ThePianoGuys on November 16, 2017.
I thought we should start this day before Christmas with a rousing, joyous song, and this arrangement of Ode to Joy and Joy to the World certainly fit that description! So click play and let your spirits be lifted as you read my writing news and enjoy a small excerpt from Tom’s story.
WRITING NEWS:
Frosted Windowpanes concludes this Thursday. I published this novelette along with two others last Thursday. (One is a Pride and Prejudice Variation and the second is a Sense and Sensibility Variation) This bundle of stories was also given out to my mailing list subscribers. If you wish to subscribe and get this collection of three novelettes as a gift, you can do that here:
Click the picture to be taken to the form to subscribe.
This mailing list offer is only good for another week. So if you’re a mailing list sort of person, sign up soon. If, however, you are not a mailing list sort of person and would prefer to purchase the book, you can do that here:
Here’s a little bonus info thing for the curious (like me 😉 ):
Wondering how long a novelette is? This handy chart can help. I got this one from Wikipedia. I use a slightly modified version of these numbers for classification purposes.I know that for one Romance Writers of America award (I think it is the RITA contest), they use 20,000 to 40,000 as the word count range for a novella. Therefore, since I write romance novellas, I use the RWA numbers for novellas, which means a novelette for me goes up to 19,999 words. The novelettes in my Nature's Fury and Delights book are between about 9,200 and 11,675 words. :)I think it is important to note that classifications can vary by genre. (The above chart is not a romance genre chart.) There is no one set guideline. I just thought you might like to know how I am classifying my stories. :)And one more thing I must include here before returning you to your regularly scheduled Music Monday post: Neither word count nor page count defines a good story -- story structure does that. ;) But that's a whole other discussion (and a topic I love discussing).
Ok, now back to my writing news:
Next Thursday, Loving Lydia will begin. I have written three Thursday posts of Loving Lydia so far, and hope to get another one written this week so that I am a month ahead of what is posting.
I have received the final edits for Delighting Mrs. Bennet back from my proofreader and will be starting on those this week. I hope to have the preorder set up for this book by next Monday — However, it is the holiday season so my plans may not go as scheduled. I’ll let you know next Monday. I still expect to have this book published on January 10, 2019.
My writing time was very limited this past week due to the book coming out on Thursday and Christmas preparations. However, I did manage to complete two chapters of Tom’s story. (I began one of those chapters last week, so really I only wrote one and two-thirds chapters. 🙂 ) I’m hoping to get at least that much written this week, but again, all story production plans are subject to change this week. [I will begin posting this on Patreon after the holidays are over.]
While working on Tom’s story this week, I discovered that dictation is a great way for me to do story brainstorming. There is something that happens when I talk out loud to myself that helps the ideas come together and start to connect better than any other method I have used previously. It was kind of exciting to see. I had noticed that using dictation when brainstorming for Lydia’s story had seemed to help, but I wasn’t sure if it was a fluke or not. It appears it is not. I think my brain works best this way. (And figuring out how my brain works best is exciting stuff to me.)
