...to want to...

Scotty! Here I am, back from Aus and now on to my 3rd book. A critic/former colleague whose opinion I greatly value has suggested that I try offering my (eventual) trilogy to publishers, rather than doing it myself on Amazon. Which I have done, with book 1...until the rejections start rolling in and then I might rethink. I'm having a local firm print a run of 50 for friends and family anyway, Would you like me to send you the digital version?

Hiya Scotty, no, sorry, there's been a lot going on in my life, but when I get back from Australia and visiting my grandchildren, it'll be all go, promise! x

And thanks again, Scotty...you have been so encouraging! x

Oh, believe me, Scotty, there are so many surprises, twists and turns to be explored! Truth is stranger than fiction, after all...

And then...

Eventually Uri said to me, “Come, my dearest, let’s to bed, for the first time to sleep together all night, undisturbed and free of guilt.”
I willingly agreed, and, banking the fire and extinguishing the candles, we walked up the narrow steps to our own room, our own bed, our own life. In the morning, I awoke before Uri, which had never before happened. I gazed with love at his homely face with its smile lines around his eyes, his skin still brown from working outdoors during the summer, and the grey hair at his temples that had crept insidiously on during the more than ten years of our demi-marriage. Sappho’s words again came to my mind: “For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see, but the good man will at once also beautiful be.” Despite the appalling row with my father the previous evening, I felt lighter and freer than ever before in my life. I was at home now, happier than I had ever been. Uri and I had made love after we had gone to bed, gentle, unhurried, as if we had our whole life ahead of us. He had spent hours kissing and caressing my entire body, and I had reciprocated; his masculine beauty continued to kindle in me such desire that I could not prevent myself from behaving, purely instinctively, in a manner considered unseemly by polite society. It seemed important to mark this night as a special time, the start of our true marriage. This was no temporary measure, as we had been used to, making do with the scraps before we could sit down to the rich banquet that was to be our real life. There were to be no more furtive visits and pretending to be naught but acquaintances. This time there was no crescent moon, sign of lustful abandon; rather, it was rounded, golden and full of promise, like a sun-blessed peach, or the belly of a woman close to her time. The full moon, the time for love that renders a woman’s body as sweet as a ripe fig and as fragrant as a rose in full bloom.

And so it was that I conceived our beautiful son, the long awaited one. Our Jonathan, “the gift of God.”

Scotty!!!
Thanks for the query...no not yet, I'm waiting on my friend to help me get it properly formatted. Not long now though!
Second one is going well thanks...I've got to stop getting so emotionally entangled with my characters, though! Their little boy, Jonathan just died of diphtheria and I cried all afternoon. Having waited those 12 years to marry, he was their only child. What an awful time it was to be a mother, and a woman. Everything was against you.
Do you want another extract? :)

I glanced about the cheerful room, with its dresser where blue and white china was neatly arranged, the comfortable old oak chairs and the Turkey rug in front of the fire and thought how very homely it all was. It was a house filled with contentment and the warm bonds of family. How very different from the dark, cold, and mournful rooms in which Father and I lived our lives of quiet desperation. I had a momentary vision of living with Mr Uri Upton as his wife in a cottage just such as this, seated on either side of the fire, companionably silent or sharing our hopes and dreams. And upstairs, in the big feather bed… I shook myself back to reality. I knew that this could never be. Father needed me, and anyway, he would never consent to my marriage to a humble tradesman. Mr Uri was looking at me, and I knew that he had divined exactly what had been running through my mind. The shame of it!

Thank you both.

Scotty - Sarah was my gt.gt aunt, who had to wait 12 years to marry her Uri. They married a month or so after her father's death, which is interesting, as she was supposed to be in mourning. I knew nothing about her until researching the first book. Now, though, she is my heroine, and I just adore Uri Upton for waiting for her all those years.

Well, first book's printing is almost done...it is quite a faff even on Amazon to get things sorted. The title is "In the King's Service: the forgotten victims of Empire and Revolution."
I'm now well into the sequel. 45,000 words, to be exact. Another true story of the same family, showing how the what would now be diagnosed as PTSD as a result of the Revolutionary war affected the subsequent generations.
The introductory chapter...
SARAH CARLYLE UPTON, STAFFORDSHIRE, 1880

I am old now, and tired of living since the death of my beloved. My dearest Uri, for whose love I fought for years against my father’s opposition.
I have long thought that my life has been like a rose that never quite found the chance to bloom in its fullness of summer, blighted as it has been since my childhood by my father’s youthful tragedies and subsequent infamies. Without my Uri, what would have become of me?
As the youngest, and the guardian of my father in his old age, I am in possession of many family papers and records, letters and diaries, the sorting and disposal of which have fallen to me to facilitate.
Before I destroy all these papers, it is, I feel, my duty to document the story of my family. I, the last living of the nine children of Thomas Fairfax Fearnley Carlyle and Mary Holmes. My father, an enigma. My mother, tolerant and understanding of the terrible and turbulent times of the American Revolution that shaped my father’s character and made him the complex and inexplicably natured man that he was. It is the least I can do to leave a legacy of understanding and compassion of how it came about that he took the life of a young man whose only fault was that he loved my older sister.

blahblahblahblah....20 pages on.....

And I? Sarah Carlyle, the cadet of the family, born at a time when our parents were entirely disenchanted with the notion of yet another child, with all the attendant worry and expense. Father had his sons, Mother had no spare time, with a number of daughters, not all of them docile and malleable. I was the afterthought, the end-of-line child who made no fuss, nor demanded anything. A girl-child with little of the storybook heroine about her. Straight, mousy hair that refused to take a curl, despite long hours spent in curling rags, pale complexion, slightly myopic eyes of an indiscriminate blue-grey, thin and gangling limbs. The sort of child that appeals to no-one.
But I had two assets, possessed by none of my sisters.
I was clever. And I won the faithful heart of Uri Upton.

If you're familiar with Yorkshire, you probably know the Hall.

Hi Scottie, and thanks for your enquiry. Yes, it's all ready to go. I'm getting a bunch privately printed in the UK for the benefit of the house where the family lived-it's open to the public and has a gift shop...they want to stock it for sale, so I'm gifting them the profits towards the upkeep of the Hall. Also getting it on Amazon within the next week I hope...
I've already started on the sequel too!