This week my WIP is my VERY SHORT novella (can you hear me screaming from here?) for the Bluestocking Belles’ Christmas Boxed set. I’m editing my contribution, entitled Somewhere Called Home.

Actually, I’d appreciate your help! I’m thinking of calling this novella Somewhere Like Home and the full novel later will be called Somewhere Called Home.  What do you ladies all think? From a reader standpoint?  They will be VERY different.

Choices:

a) Call both Somewhere Called Home

b) Call Novella Somewhere Like Home and Novel Somewhere Called Home

c) Doesn’t matter.

Please indicate your choice in the comments below!

Thanks very much!

 

Here’s a WIP excerpt!

Setting: Here’s the prologue for Somewhere Called Home… which won’t be in the novella, as it was too long….. so enjoy it now! It will, however, be in the full length novel, to be released six months after the Belles’ novella boxed set comes out!

 

1807  Whitsun, Lairg Parish, Scotland

The young boy tapped the side of his shaggy highland pony with his leg, moving her closer to his father’s bigger horse and tucked his plaid closer around his neck to keep out some of the early morning mist. He stared down from the hillock above the baile at the straggling group of heavily laden men and women, encumbered with ragged, crying bairns, walking along the dirt track leading from the cluster of blackhouses. He’d never seen so many people in one place before. The families were nearly all walking, some limping as they went, older men and women supported by the shoulders of others of younger years. A lad rode in a hay wagon behind a single pony, its bed loaded high with roof timbers and a few pieces of furniture.

“Where are they going, Da?”

“To the coast.”

“Why would they want to do that, Da? There was nothing out there when we went to collect rents, just rocks and gulls.”

The lad’s father, his face pale beneath the tan, took a deep breath as he shook his head. “Ye’r right, lad. There’s naught out there. Their laird wants the land fer sheep, though the good lord knows the woolies’ll never be able to defend our lands like the clansmen do now.”

“But—” the lad began again.

“Naught we can do fer it, let’s get back home and just pray it doesn’t happen there.” He wheeled his mount and turned back the way they’d come.

 

Hope you enjoyed this little bit of my WIP.

And if you’ve read A Long Trail Rolling, the boy is someone in the story.

Who do you think it is?

Please comment about who you think this is, along with your preferences listed above for the book and novella titles!

xx

Talk soon,

Lizzi