...and we're back!

I had a very relaxing weekend.  Caught up on sleep, spent time with family and friends, and did some stuff around the house.  Oh, and read (more on that later).

 

Friday night during bunco, the ladies at my table started asking me about the book.  Much hilarity ensued when I let slip that one of my scenes is currently titled "blue balls".  Ahaha.  These are mostly woman from my Sunday school class, mind.  But I did get a few of them to admit they read romance, and the way a few others were asking, I think they do (or want to) but aren't ready to admit it in public yet.  Heh.

 

Saturday I finally got the landscaping around my water garden under control, did my fall transplanting, and took down, fixed, and rebuilt the waterfall that flows into the pond.  Then we went out for a picnic with our Sunday school class (saw a lot of them this weekend!), and afterwards to our friends' house to watch the game.  Which really meant the women sat in the kitchen or playroom and chatted while the guys watched.  Fine with me; I'm not that into football.  But Kentucky won!  Who would've thought?

 

Sunday was church, and then DH's dad came up to spend the afternoon.  We've really got to be careful what we say around grandparents now.  Little Boy (he's not a baby anymore *sniff*) really enjoyed the MagnaDoodle at our friends' the previous day.  DH mentioned to me in the presence of his dad that we ought to think about getting LB one sometime soon, so he can practice writing with no mess.  Guess what FIL insisted on buying while we were out?  Yup.

 

Yesterday was *insanely* busy at work.  Oh, and I was finishing up The Bronze Horseman (look for a post on that shortly).  Even so, I managed to get about 800 words down in between things.  I was so emotionally caught up in TBH that I rode that wave of emotion into thinking how Elspeth would feel when she returns, something I hadn't let myself work on yet.  It's about as close to "method writing" as I get - sometimes strong emotions elicited in me from a book or movie or situation spill over into corresponding areas of my book.

 

This is a snip from just the bare bones of a scene, but it helped for me to get it down:

History books called to her, tormented her. They could ease her burden somewhat, tell her she had done the right thing, that he had lived a full and happy life...or they could tell her the opposite. Knowing would make it final. But not knowing was driving her insane.

Ultimately she looked, but she kept herself from looking too closely, still afraid of what she would see. She skimmed pages, letting names jump out at her, only half-reading the sections that followed. [...]

A few heart-stopping times, her eyes found the name Alasdair MacGregor--alternately Alistair or Alexander and McGregor, McGrigor, or MacGriogar--and she forced herself to read on. But it was always the story of his [great]grandfather, his namesake, and the betrayal by the Colquhouns and Campbells after the Battle of Glen Fruin. So she took a breath and kept reading.

Beyond that, little to nothing of the Glenstrae branch, save that chiefship of Clan Gregor had shifted to Glengyle in the early eighteenth century. After Andrew, perhaps? She hoped; despite not knowing him well, she genuinely liked Alec's brother. But what of the second son? History, it seemed, did not remember Alasdair Colin MacGregor of Glenstrae.

But she did.