A Dash of Darcy – Page 4

Music Monday: Falling for You (Northanger Abbey)

I adore Northanger Abbey. It’s one of my favourite Jane Austen novels. I enjoy Catherine’s sweet nature and her youth and naivety (not to mention her imagination 🙂 ), and I find Henry’s teasing yet loving personality delightful.

As I was looking for a period drama montage video to share today, I watched a couple of Northanger Abbey videos, and I began to realize that Kitty in my work in progress shares some traits with Catherine — none of which were planned. Of course, they share the same name — that was not my doing ;), but they also share a love of novels and a sweet youthfulness. And both will end up with a clergyman. However, that similarity brings with it a contrast for Kitty’s parson, Mr. Collins, will be a former parson and welcomed heir to an estate while we know that Catherine’s parson, Mr. Tilney, is a son who has fallen out of favour with his father and is in the process of becoming a parson. The gentlemen have other differences as well, such as Mr. Tillney is confident while Mr. Collins is not. Their fathers, however, might have something in common.

Before I share an excerpt of my current work in progress, I need to share a little bit of writing news.

First, I want to remind you that Confounding Caroline has finished and there will be a two-week break between stories. Therefore, there will be no Thursday post this week. Delighting Mrs. Bennet will start posting on May 10.

Second, Mr. Darcy’s Comfort is currently on pre-order and will go live this Thursday! (The paperback is already live.) You can find Mr. Darcy’s Comfort at your favourite retailer by using this link: https://books2read.com/u/3GYBBr

If you wish to read a preview of Mr. Darcy’s Comfort, which is an extended preview until Thursday, you can do that at this link: https://mrdarcyscomfort.pressbooks.com/

I think that is all the news I have for you today, so let’s get to that excerpt, shall we? This clip gives a small bit of background info about Collins but also gives us a glimpse of Kitty’s personality.

AN EXCERPT FROM Master of Longbourn:
Continue reading Music Monday: Falling for You (Northanger Abbey)

Music Monday: Peaceful, Louis Landon

I could use a little peace on this Monday morning. How about you? If so, click play, and listen to this pretty piano piece while you read about the exciting, yet not so peaceful, stuff going on in my writing life and then continue on reading to enjoy the first story excerpt from Master of Longbourn.

Landon, Louis. “Louis Landon Peaceful.” YouTube, YouTube, 15 Mar. 2011, youtu.be/X2Z-dduUEaQ.

First up, writing news:

Zoe Burton, Rose Fairbanks, and I have started doing live Saturday broadcasts on our Facebook group called Longbourn Literary Society. I know that not everyone is on Facebook, so I am attempting to download the videos after we finish and then upload them to YouTube. I have managed to figure out how to do it for three of our Saturday chats. The most recent one can be found HERE. They are conversational, and we’re just learning as we go. However, it’s been a blast doing these. If you have any questions for any of us, feel free to leave them in the comments here or on the YouTube video. We’ll do our best to answer them. [warning: They’re not short. We get very chatty.]

Mr. Darcy’s Comfort is in the process of being put on preorder. I finished a very long session of editing Saturday night just as the clock was striking midnight. As I write this post on Sunday night, I have submitted the files to one ebook sales platform and have two others to do. The print version will be worked on after the ebook has been put on preorder. The release day for this book is Thursday, April 26, 2018 — that’s just ten days away! But it should be enough time to get the print book ready to go. (I hope 😉 barring any technical issues)

Confounding Caroline concludes this week, and there will be no Thursday story for two weeks. I will be sending that manuscript to my final editor this week, and am still planning to have it ready to release by mid-May which is close to when the sequel Delighting Mrs. Bennet is set to start posting on Thursdays. It’s been a bit tricky to work on two new stories while having these other two so close to publication, so I will breathe a sigh of relief later this week when some of those items are off my plate, at least for a while. 🙂

I have started posting the sequel to Mr. Darcy’s Comfort on Patreon, and I am happy to report that I have just passed the 10K word mark on that story. I am enjoying this story so much. Here’s something you won’t hear very often — I’m loving Mr. Collins! Yep. Mr. Collins. He’s the romantic hero in this story, which is also something you won’t hear very often. LOL To me, he’s awkwardly endearing in this story. Until tonight, I had not decided on a title for this story, but since chapter one is in the back of Mr. Darcy’s Comfort, it had to have a title. I have had a list of titles and the one I chose, Master of Longbourn, has been “speaking to me” as I have been writing. It seems to encapsulate a good deal of the inner conflict poor Mr. Collins has been facing so far. Below is an excerpt from chapter two which I hope will give you a tiny taste of Mr. Collins’s character as I am writing him.

Whatever you do, when you read the excerpts I will be sharing, do not think of any of the versions of Mr. Collins you have seen in film or likely any you have read in various variations either. Come to this story with an open mind expecting that I will do as I always do and present a character to you that is perhaps a bit different than you expect with a backstory that makes him who he is and poses a challenge for him becoming who he wishes to be. Or in other words, remember who is writing this story. Leenie likes to shape and mould these less likable characters into something new and enjoyable. (And she’s hoping to do just that with her Mr. Collins.)

Here’s your first peek at my Mr. Collins. Enjoy!

AN EXCERPT FROM Master of Longbourn: Continue reading Music Monday: Peaceful, Louis Landon

Music Monday: Period Drama, Ghost of a Rose (Blackmore’s Night)

I thought today I would share a recent addition to my Music Meets Movies YouTube playlist. I had never heard this song before coming across this video, but I like it. It’s the sort of song that sparks the imagination, and we all know how I love a song that can do that. Even better is when that sort of song is accompanied by images from various period dramas as it is in this video. 🙂 There’s story inspiration all through this video, I think. I hope you enjoy it and then read on to hear my writing news and to take a peek at what I was writing this week. There are actually a couple of items I would like to have your opinion on if you are willing to give it.

In writing news…

I have begun edits on Confounding Caroline, and the further into it I go, the more assured I am that my instinct to end where I did was a good one. I have also done a bit of brainstorming for the sequel to that story which will probably be called Delighting Mrs. Bennet. My mind is currently working on a couple of questions that arose during my brainstorming, and I hope to find a bit of time this week to start writing that story as my brain continues to work on the questions. For me, sometimes (or is that often 😉 ) the answers are found as the story begins to take shape.

I am also still working on Mr. Darcy’s Comfort and beginning to wonder if it is indeed going to be a Dash of Darcy story or something longer.

I try not to set word count limits for my stories. I like them to go where they naturally want to go. They end where they end. I don’t fluff them up to hit a particular number nor do I cut out scenes to make them fit in a lower range of words.

Here’s my dilemma, and you can tell me what you think. My Dash of Darcy stories, to this point, have been about 25,000 words (some have been just over 26,000) or less. The concept of A Dash of Darcy stories is for them to be quick reads that fit into busy lives and for people like me who absolutely love novellas. If I wish to put Mr. Darcy’s Comfort in that collection, I may have to extend that upper limit. But that wouldn’t be such a bad thing though, right? Five or ten thousand more words would not make them too long to be a quick read that fits into a busy life, right? I’d love to hear your opinion on this.

Speaking of books in the Dash of Darcy series, they often have companion books and one of those sorts of books just released this past Thursday!

Enticing Miss Darcy is now published! And the first few reviews have been great! Thank you for that. After reading one review that listed Unravelling Mr. Darcy, Becoming Entangled, and Enticing Miss Darcy in order for other readers, I did make a change to the “series” title on these books. Normally, I just list them as either A Dash of Darcy or A Dash of Darcy Companion Story on the retail sites. However, I had worried about readers being able to easily find all three books, and that review let me know that that worry was probably founded in a real need. So, they are now listed as Unravelled, Entangled, and Enticed: A Dash of Darcy and Companions Trilogy and each book is numbered.

Another reader on Facebook asked if I was going to do A Dash of Darcy Companion Duos like I do with the Dash of Darcy stories.

I’d like to hear how you feel about book bundles. Do you think a book should only be “packaged” in a bundle once or would you be fine with the book being in a number of bundles as long as the bundle clearly states which books are contained in that bundle? The reason I ask is because I am thinking of doing some various collections just to offer a greater selection of purchasing options to readers. Frankly, I love a bargain and think book bundles are awesome since I can usually save a few dollars, and I like having options. However, I would like to hear other thoughts on it as well.

Ok, now, for…

AN EXCERPT FROM Mr. Darcy’s Comfort: Continue reading Music Monday: Period Drama, Ghost of a Rose (Blackmore’s Night)

Music Monday: Mayapple Road, Thad Fiscella

Here in Nova Scotia, it is March Break, so this week, I will get a reprieve from homeschooling, and my husband will be home more. However, it will still be a full week, so I decided we should start it with a calm and lovely piece of music that I first discovered while randomly listening to “more like this” songs on Spotify. (I enjoy discovering new songs that way.)

Let’s first cover a couple of things that are happening this week on Tuesday and Thursday which you might want to know about.

Thursday, March 15, 2018, is release day for this book! (It is on pre-order right now.)

Now on to an update about what I did in my writing time this past week.

I worked on getting things ready for the release of Enticing Miss Darcy rather than editing since I did not have a completed manuscript begging for my attention.

However, as of Friday, it seems that has changed, and I now have a story needing first round edits. You see, I have been waffling on what to do with Confounding Caroline. I felt like it was coming to an end as I have been writing on it the past few Fridays. But, I felt conflicted since it is not ending with an HEA ending but rather an HFN (Happy For Now) ending. No matter how I tried to not let that be true, it did not feel right for the story to introduce a new quest or goal for my main character. So, I allowed it to end — very sweetly and with the idea that there will be a story to follow. Therefore, I will be spending what editing time I have this week analyzing the story structure and beginning to reread, and I will be brainstorming how the next story (Delighting Mrs. Bennet) is going to progress. The final post for Confounding Caroline is currently scheduled for April 12th, and then, I will likely take a week or two break before starting to post the next story. This will give me time to actually get that story started and be enough of a distance into it to feel settled in the plot. That’s the “big” WIP news for the week, but it was not the only WIP I was working on.

I have gotten to chapter 6 in Mr. Darcy’s Comfort. Chapters 1-4 have been posted at Patreon, and chapter 5 will go up early this week. It has been taking me longer than two writing sessions to get each of these chapters done. I have really felt “bottlenecked”– as if something has been holding me back, and I suspect that it was making that decision about Confounding Caroline because there was a sense of relief once I finished writing Friday night (well early Saturday morning 🙂 ). Hopefully, this relief will translate to quicker writing, but it is March Break, so all bets are off as I will be spending time with my husband (and kids).

As I was writing Mr. Darcy’s Comfort this week, I moved from the melancholy tone that the story has had to this point to a more hopeful tone. A new character was introduced at Rosings — Mr. Collins :), and I have just returned to Longbourn to check in on Elizabeth before Darcy returns to the area. The excerpt below is part of what I wrote in Thursday’s writing session and is where I will be picking up the story tonight when I sit down to write.

AN EXCERPT FROM Mr. Darcy’s Comfort: Continue reading Music Monday: Mayapple Road, Thad Fiscella

Music Monday: My Heart Will Go On, 2Cellos

This week as I was writing, I shared this video with my Dash of Darcy Readers group on Facebook and told them that it might just be the song I shared on Monday on my blog. And here it is. 🙂 Along with this video, I shared the following line from what I had been writing that evening:

“I could never forget you, even without these things,” he said to Anne. “You will always be in my heart. I may not have loved you as well as I should have, but I did love you.” [Doesn’t it go well with the song?]

I’m not sharing the scene in which you will find that line today. Instead, I am sharing the scene that follows immediately after it. However, that scene starts on a similar melancholy note. So, the song choice still seems to fit well.

But first, I must update you on the release of Enticing Miss Darcy. I have just uploaded the ebook files and set a release date of March 15, 2018. I made the decision to push the date out a week because there are some things I would like to do before the book releases and rushing it just to hit the deadline I had set was not going to be conducive to getting those things done. [And my back is doing better. It’s not 100% yet, but it is much improved. I have also figured out how to get work things done with some modifications. 😉 Now, I ‘m just trying to play catch up.]

And now for…

AN EXCERPT FROM Mr. Darcy’s Comfort: Continue reading Music Monday: My Heart Will Go On, 2Cellos