I haven’t totally fallen off the face of the Earth, just fallen behind. Without connecting to a writing group, here’s a snippet from my WIP, a steampunk fantasy romance targeted at the 18+ New Adult audience. The working title is The Farm. Today I’m sharing an early point when the heroine, Annmar leaves her home in the city to take a new job. She will be doing advertising for a large ‘collective’ farm in a rural location called Blighted Basin.
With a blast of steam and a jerk, the five-thirty a.m. train to Gaptown pulled out of Glenwood-on-Tyne’s station. Annmar heaved a sigh of relief. Worrying that someone would stop her was ludicrous, but… She’d been most careful, confiding only in Polly. The glow on the eastern horizon hinted at dawn as the train crossed the misty fields of the outlying farms. An unusually large grouping of five barns and three silos caught her eye, and she knew the spread belonged to Shearing Enterprises even before she found his logo on the tallest silo.
So she wasn’t past his reaches yet.
Annmar hadn’t told Mrs. Rennet about the new job, just gave her notice at the end of the day. Mr. Shearing would try to wheedle her destination from the shopkeeper, who unfortunately would do anything for a price.
On the way to the boarding house, she made one stop to purchase the half-dozen sketchbooks she needed in case she stayed the winter. The ‘hinterlands’, as Polly called Blighted Basin, might not sell fine paper, so why not get them now that she had the money to do it? The brown-paper wrapped package went into her trunk, along with her few reminders of her home with Mother.
Additional excerpts are posted under my novels, and linked here. Thanks for reading!
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