March Diary | Monday, 4th

I sewed up a new cloth for my table in a cheerful print that has all my favorite colors in it. Then I took the paper snowflakes off the windows and put up some shamrocks and flowers. I am so eager for spring, eager to be feeling better, eager to be outside.

And, it is snowing right now.

Yesterday morning I bought a pattern and yarn from Knit Picks--one of the IDP kits. I've been looking at these for a while and finally decided to give one a try. I chose a lace cardigan paired with KP's fingering weight Palette yarn, which comes in one hundred fifty colors. I've never used this yarn before. My experience with KP yarns has been hit or miss. I love Chroma and Stroll, but I am not a fan of Swish which I found shed a lot. I'm hoping the kit will arrive by Wednesday for Ginny's yarn along, but that's probably wishful thinking.

I am so close to finishing my story, but this darn illness has got me so down that I haven't been able to write. I am re-reading old romance novels from the eighties and nineties instead. It amazes me how much the genre has changed since then. The older books were longer, the plots and characters more complex, and the language richer, fuller.

Here are the opening lines from Lavyrle Spencer's Hummingbird (copyright 1983, 404 pages):

      When the 9:50 pulled into Stuart's Junction, it always attracted a crowd, for the train was still a novelty which the whole town anticipated daily. Barefoot children squatted like quail in the sand reed and needlegrass just outside town till the loud, gaseous monstrosity flushed them up and raced them the last quarter mile to the gabled depot. Ernie Turner, the town drunk, came each day to meet it, too. Belching and weaving his way out of the saloon, he would settle on a bench by the depot door to sleep it off till the afternoon train sent him back for his evening round.

Here are the opening lines from The Rejected Suitor, by Teresa McCarthy (copyright 2012, 228 pages) :

     How dare they do this! If they thought to dictate whom she would marry without a word from her, as if she were a mere child toddling about their knees, then they had better think again. This was intolerable!

     Seated at the lavish dining table at Elbourne Hall, Lady Emily Clearbrook clenched the folds of her grown and leveled a withering gaze toward her four older brothers. "Did it ever occur to you, gentleman, that I should have been consulted about this monumental decision?"

In The Rejected Suitor we know exactly what the story is about in the opening paragraph. This is known as the "hook". Today's editors want the reader hooked early, preferably with the first sentence. Unfortunately, I am not particularly interested in finding out who Lady Emily's brothers have chosen for her.

In Hummingbird, the reader hasn't a clue what she is getting herself into, ...but, oh boy, a train is coming!  It's still a hook, but a more subtle, interesting one. I want to know who or what is on that train. I want to find out what happens next.

This is how I entertain myself during these last hoary days of winter.