Coming Soon: The Typewriter
If you’ve been reading along with my Substack while I’ve been on maternity leave, you know that one of the things I’ve been doing is revisiting some pieces from my personal archives.
This week I thought I’d share with you something a little different. I’ve written before about how challenging The Whispers of War was to write thanks, in part, to it being a sophomore book. (Always difficult.) The manuscript went through a lot of drafts before I landed on the version that you see when you pick up the book today.
As I was rooting around in my files, I found one of the casualties of all of those reworkings and edits. It’s a self-contained chapter of the book featuring a charming date between Marie, our heroine, and a widower named Richard. I realized as I read through it that the chapter had the potential even though it didn’t fit with the structure that the manuscript ended up taking on.
I set about reworking the existing text, expanding it out and changing things around to create a standalone short story. In TV parlance, it’s a sort of bottle episode, if you like. (If you have read The Whispers of War, I would say that this fits neatly into the narrative just before chapter 19.)
The short story is long enough to be released in two parts, so I’ll be putting out part one this Friday, and part 2 next Friday. Be sure you’re subscribed so that you get both parts in your inbox or on your Substack app!