Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

April Snippets

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At one point I cherished fond hopes of being able to raise my Camp NaNo goal from 20K to 25K words, but things didn’t quite work out that way. As matters stand now I think I’ll probably come in under the wire just in time with my original goal and be satisfied with that. The past week hasn’t been exactly easy. I’ll tell you, if it wasn’t for Camp NaNo keeping me up to the mark I might have knuckled under and put my notebooks away for a while by this point…but seeing as it is Camp NaNo, I forge on. Anyway, here’s a few snippets of The Mountain of the Wolf from all throughout the month, mostly from the early scene-setting part of the story:

Quincy got up and went to the door and opened it. A rim of pale light still rested round the horizon, and above it, a single glimmering star hung straight over the canyon. All else was blue-black. The silence was enormous, as if the vastness of the uninhabited mountains expanded after dark.

Asked in that honest way, it sounded like such a small thing…to be a little lonesome. Rosa Jean would have given a good deal not to answer the question, but she did not feel like being rude this morning—not to someone who had treated her better than most.

There was no answer, and [Charlie] slid his elbows off the fence and moved closer—edging round outside a certain radius from the door, however, for he had met a pan of dishwater in the face before, and he could not be entirely certain it had been by accident.

As they neared the herd one or two mares’ heads went up, nostrils flaring to snuff suspiciously—one of them stamped a hoof, but still they did not move. Then suddenly a trumpeting whinny rang from the canyon walls and a dark streak of a stallion plunged from the brush where he had been keeping lookout, diving between the mustangers and the herd.

Quincy turned and looked down at him, and somehow the sharp blue slice of his glance robbed Charlie of any further desire to be facetious. “Mind your own business,” he said.

Autumn Snippets

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I finished the first draft of Lost Lake House yesterday! I know it’s going to need revision, but I’m pretty happy with it nonetheless. It was a story where I thought I had everything pretty well mapped out beforehand, but once I began writing, I started discovering unexpected depths to the characters and realizing that certain aspects would need to be fleshed out better. A lot of that is what I’ll be dealing with when it comes time to edit. But in the meantime, here’s some snippets! I’ve also shared a few bits on Twitter throughout the writing process: here, here and here.

She rounded a turn and twenty incarnations of her own tense white face flashed upon her view. It was a long, curving hall, dropping down one step at intervals toward the nether regions of the building, perhaps the kitchens—but even here the décor was grand; the walls were lined with gold-framed mirrors, hung in a row like ancestral portraits, but empty until filled by the reflection of whoever stepped into the hall.

Maurice Vernon was here with three or four other men gathered around him—standing with his well-shod feet apart and looking, as always, ready to figure prominently in a newspaper photograph.

The rooms all had that empty, littered look that any place has the day after a party, only with the Lost Lake House this was its condition every morning. The men’s boots clumped on the polished marble floor without the least consideration of its expensiveness; one man pinched out the stub of his cigarette and tossed it in a corner.

She was playing with fire and she knew it—but almost her whole life was playing with fire now, so what difference did a few more sparks make?

Marshall produced the ring of keys from his pocket again and jingled them before her. “Boathouse, tool shed, and three doors in the grounds. They’ve got the Lake House monogram on them.”

“Of course!—Golly, that was short-sighted, wasn’t it.”

Marshall grinned slightly for the first time. “The monogram, or trusting ’em to me?”

The rowboat moved swiftly, cutting a glittering, washing wake through the light cast on the lake from the windows of the Lake House. And there was a paler light around them now, too, that broke into ripples on the surface of the water—Dorothy realized that it was moonlight.

December Snippets

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A surprise holiday post! I am on Internet vacation this week. But it so happens that in the week leading up to Christmas, I wrote most of a short Christmas story (which didn’t turn out as short as I expected, incidentally), to which I’ve been trying to write an ending in my spare time this week. I very often get the impulse to write something Christmasy at this time of year! So I thought I’d share a few bits for December’s Snippets of Story. These are all from the same story, which is set in the 1930s; its working title is “Some Christmas Camouflage.”

Kitty went to answer [the door], and found Professor Alden, looking rather like a snow-frosted barber pole in the long striped scarf that had wound itself several times around him with the wind.

He flicked over another page idly, with the pardonable air of world-weariness acquired over years of endeavoring to instill an appreciation for the past in endless successions of young people interested only in the present and their own part in the present.

But Wesley did not at once notice [the room’s] plainness nor the sparseness of the furniture, and that was perhaps because the light from the single lamp fell in such a way that it struck the gold hair of the girl sitting on the sofa, and in so doing seemed to fill the room with an aura of richness.

The icy fire-escape seemed to creak and rattle as if with annoyance on his way down, where it had been a willing conspirator on the way up.

As Wesley trudged back through the streets toward the college with his hands in his coat pockets, the street lamps, the lights in other windows, the faint moonlight now tinting the dark-blue sky all seemed cold and mocking lights, which before had been laughing and cheerful.
 

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