Six Sentence Sunday, Apr. 29th

Another snippet from my western WIP, Nobody's Bride. I'm finally reaching near the end of my first draft on this one. 

This is my hero getting a gash stitched up after they've been attacked by bandits: 

Liquid warmth trickled down his temple and he realized the stitches had made fresh blood well. He heard a moan from the other side of the fire and wondered at it, but didn’t have the strength to look up. He felt the sustained tug of the thread being pulled through the hole in his skin. Finally the pressure stopped, leaving him just the agony.

Hopefully Maddy had knotted her thread good and tight. He’d hate for his head to come unraveled like the toe of an old sock.

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Six Sentence Sunday, Apr. 22nd

From my historical western WIP, Nobody's Bride. I'll leave you to figure out what the H/h are doing: 

He gripped her hand and wouldn’t let her pull away.

“No!” she said in a panic. “It’s a sin!”

“I hate to tell you, honey, but everything we’ve done tonight is a sin. What’s one more?”

“But that’s an especially bad one.”

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First Excerpt from the WIP, "Nobody's Bride"

Here's the first excerpt from my current WIP, a western romance set on the 1870 Chisholm trail:

"Lord, have mercy among the sinners among us, and allow us to walk in your holy light, free from the flames of damnation that lick at us daily. And as the Bible says, 'Then the lust, when it has conceived, bears sin; and the sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.'"

"Amen." The woman's soft voice sounded in counterpoint to her husband's rasp.

Maddy Lassiter squeezed shut her eyes and tried to ignore the pious intonings of the Rev. Burrows and his wife. Even on her deathbed, they aggravated her beyond all reason.

"As the Holy Book says in Romans 7:5, 'For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were through the law, worked in our members to bring forth fruit to death.'"

The cholera might have addled her wits, but even so, it sounded to her like the Reverend took pleasure in emphasizing the word "death." The Reverend had been praying over her and quoting Bible verses at her ever since the unfortunate situation with his son six months ago. Now, no doubt, he saw her deathly illness as the well-deserved wages of sin.

Hot, thirsty, and enervated by days of vomiting and flux, Maddy tried not to agree that she was being punished by the Lord, but it was hard. She had never thought she'd lived a sheltered life by any means, but the suffering she'd endured in the last few days made her doubt that. The wagon they'd been traveling in all the way from Indiana had become a torture chamber. Hands clasped above her makeshift berth, the Burrows wouldn't quit praying over her. It made passing on seem like a reasonable alternative to their endless disapproval.

Why a western?

My upcoming story, Montana Belle, is a western set in (obviously) Montana, in this case, 1880s Montana. Why did I decide to write a western? It's not a thriving genre nowadays. As a standalone genre, westerns per se have practically disappeared from the bookstores. Even as a romantic subgenre, they're relatively uncommon. In a genre dominated by werewolves, vampires, shapeshifters, Regency-set historicals, and suspense, westerns are a distant contender for most popular subgenre. Yet they endure. Why? I have a few theories.
The appeal of the wild west or pioneer days is never-ending. The wild west was a time of few rules and boundless opportunity. Social mores were loose, at least for the time period. Settlers could come from nothing, and, with a little luck and a lot of hard work and endurance, reshuffle their spot in the social order, something that wasn't possible back east. (Montana Belle involves a hero who does just that.) The landscape, wild, rugged, and dangerous, is without a doubt a character in most westerns. The setting is also rife with opportunities for conflict: Rancher versus farmer. Native Americans versus white settlers. Outlaws versus law enforcement. Miners versus miners, and miners versus the elusive metals and minerals they set out to find, often with heartbreaking results.
In addition, the wild west doesn't present the difficulties some other historical settings do. Civil War romances have fallen out of vogue partly because of the difficulty of dealing with slavery, although I still think that the right writer can mine that setting for a great story too. We're more used to seeing movies set in the wild west than say, colonial times, so there is a natural reader familiarity and comfort level with the time period. When you consider the natural opportunity for drama and the unique place these stories have in our American national character, it's no wonder westerns have endured.