Heather (part 1)

Here’s a brief never-before-published scene I imagined somewhere between Love in Andauk and More Love in Andauk. (Minor spoilers if you haven’t read the former.) Notice that the guy’s name is not mentioned. Have you read enough to guess his identity?
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    “I need a present for my mom because she’s being stupid.”
    Mrs. Johnson didn’t even blink. She walked around one of the glass shelves and returned a minute later holding something in each hand.
    Heather barely registered either item before she heard the door open behind her. When she saw who was coming in, she lost all ability to focus and, for some unknown reason, the feeling in both her legs.
    He tried to hang back near the door, but Mrs. Johnson smiled and urged him forward with a question about how she could help.
    “I don’t want to interrupt,” he said. His eyes searched Heather for how upset she was by the interruption.
    She wasn’t upset. She was delighted to see him, despite the shock and mortification, despite being unable to tell him that, despite still just trying not to fall over.
    “We’re going to be awhile picking the perfect gift,” Mrs. Johnson said. “If you have a quick need, we can do that first.”
    He took another step forward, still trying to gauge Heather’s reaction.
    She managed to nod a little, which she meant to give him permission to continue. Heather was having trouble remembering why she was there so Mrs. Johnson was likely right about her not being quick.
    “I was just at St. Jude’s,” he said. “Mrs. Donnelly caught me leaving and sent me here to pick up… She said you had a box of… um… trinkets for the festival next week.”
    “Oh, it’s sweet of you to save me a trip. I’ll just run upstairs to get those.” Mrs. Johnson pressed the items in her hands into Heather’s hands. Then she pulled a key from her pocket to unlock a door on the side of the shop. Her footsteps tapped lightly on wooden stairs after she disappeared.
    Heather looked down at her hands. There was a snow globe in one and an awkwardly tall vase in the other. Both were glass and dangerously slippery in her sweaty hands. She’d seen him at church and around town in the year and a half since Kayla made the idiotic decision to dump him – since Kayla had cited Heather being in love with him as the reason for her idiotic decision – but this was the first time she’d been in a position to have an actual conversation with him.
    “Who’s the gift for?” he asked.
    “My mom.” Heather’s eyes slipped over a pretty cross on one of the shelves as they lifted to meet his. It filled her with courage and a bit of clarity, though her legs were still jelly. “I’ve had some car trouble, and she’s been giving me rides everywhere. I was going to get a friend to take me to pick it up this afternoon, but she insisted she could do that, too. I wanted a small thank you… something.”
    “Doesn’t your mom collect butterflies?”
    She tried not to gasp audibly that he remembered. It was a tiny fact not worth gasping over. “Yes,” she said.
    “Got to be a butterfly in here somewhere.” He turned towards the shelves.
    He was going to help her find a silly present for her mom? Heather quickly stashed the items she was holding on the closest shelf. She knew that wasn’t where Mrs. Johnson had found them, but there wasn’t much organization in the second-hand shop. And the fragile things were safer there.
    “What about this one?” He pointed.
    Heather moved closer to see what it was. It was a plaque with a lame platitude engraved. A butterfly graced one corner amid a blur of flowers, but it wasn’t the focal point.
    He laughed at the expression that apparently gave away more of her opinion than she intended. “Not even close, huh?”
    “Well, it’s… uh… it’s not… butteriflied enough.” Heather cringed. What in the world had she just said?
    “I’ll… I think I’ll try again.” He focused on the knickknacks spread out before them, but there was an earnestness in his voice that somehow reached beyond the trivial present to a hope Heather had never dared to have before.
    She prayed that hope wasn’t as obvious on her face as her previous thought.


To be continued...

The Order of Operations

We’ve all been tempted to skip ahead while reading a book.  I’m not talking about a bad book where a reader skips to the ending to more quickly move on to something worth reading.  I mean a good book where the reader gets impatient for even better scenes with thoughts like, “I suspect he’ll eventually win her over with his pirate impression, and I need to know if I should be tracking every mention for possible foreshadowing,” or “I predict she will find the magic portal back home under that spooky shed when she accidentally burns it to the ground, and I just can’t wait to know if I’m right.”  These are universal thoughts.  But we all resist the urge to look ahead because that’s just not how you read a book. 

I have to admit I’m occasionally tempted to skip ahead with books I write as well.  Sometimes in the early chapters I’m thinking about how much more fun it’ll be to write the super romantic thing he says or does to really cement the relationship.  I have to wait.  I can’t write the super romantic line until it becomes romantic through everything that happens first.  I need to multiply the feelings before I add the people.

Let’s examine a real, non-romantic example.  One of the best lines in The Lord of the Rings is when Sam says, “Come, Mr. Frodo!  I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you.”  Starting the book from this line makes the amazing quote dumb.  What is this thing that Mr. Frodo can’t carry?  And why does Sam think carrying it with the added weight of a person will be easier?  Sam doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  And if you read just enough to know they’re trying to get to the top of Mt. Doom, it’s even worse.  Anyone trying to climb something literally called Mt. Doom must be a moron.  It’s the rest of the story that makes it awesome.  Reading it out of order makes as much sense as a math problem with only half the equation.

It's the same with a romance.  I can’t skip to a scene where the heroine swoons over a plate of deviled eggs when the hero peels off the tin foil, puts it on his head, and says, “Pro nobis.”  By itself, it’s a terrible scene.  But… if I’ve written the part where they meet at a picnic reaching for the last deviled egg at the same time, and the part where he works to overcome his fear of mustard bottles to make the recipe he got from her mom, and I’ve written several scenes about her recurring dream where she’s married to a guy she can’t see but always makes her feel safe and cherished and has tin foil on his head, and I included the bit that specifies her love language is Latin… then it’s a beautiful moment.  Right?

Don’t worry about any of that being a spoiler for book 4 though.  I’m still working on the multiplication, and I haven’t added any deviled eggs.

Not Wrong

I had trouble coming up with a topic for this month, which should surprise no one. I’ve already used not knowing what to write about as a topic to write about. More than once.  More than twice actually, but I won't try to list them all.  You're welcome.

I may have exhausted that non-topic.

I did have one idea. I checked the stats on this blog to see which posts have gotten the most attention. Perhaps seeing what’s been popular would let me know what people want to read. I discovered that two posts near the top of the list have the word wrong in the titles. One was called “I think I’ll keep doing it wrong.” And the other from about a year later was called “Still Wrong.” This suggests people enjoy reading about me being wrong.

That can’t be right.

But in an effort to remain entertaining, I tried really hard to think of other times I’ve been wrong so I could share those. There aren’t any. I’m sure I’ve been right about absolutely everything else.

I did, however, think of a recent example of someone else thinking I was wrong. This person read an early draft of my next book and made only one comment in the whole thing. It was an entire paragraph about how wrong I was to have the main character paint a room yellow. I was wrong to have others approve the choice, wrong for having someone assure her it wasn’t bold because yellow is totally bold and wrong. The person who tried to convince me of this may or may not be related to me.

In all honesty, yellow is probably the last color I’d choose for paint. But I didn’t choose it, my character did. She’s allowed to like things I don’t and have opinions I don’t share. I might have considered this feedback if I hadn’t already designed the cover based on the color in that scene. Starting over on the cover would have been very, very wrong.