To avoid any ado…

1.)   I’ll be pulling the old Hex excerpt from this site and replacing it with what you’ll see below.

2.)   Accompanying this switching of excerpts, a few changes will be coming to this blog and site. At one time, I blogged quite a bit, but since my blogging has dwindled, I’m modifying the feed into a monthly “column” of sorts called Musings, where I’ll spend a little time once a month trying to be insightful and witty and, you know, stuff. I just can’t keep up with a blog anymore—obviously, judging from my lack of posts. But I am on Twitter now. I’m still new and getting my bearings, so please stick it out if you decide to follow me, and I promise I’ll try to figure it out. You can find me under the name KatieVLovett.

And now for the excerpts.

(The longer excerpt previously included on this page has been removed while I do another round of revision. These new excerpts are the opening paragraphs of each of my point-of-view characters’ first point-of-view
scenes. Sorry for the patchiness of these excerpts; my revision methods are weird and all over the place, so these are the things I’m able to share right now—and again, sorry they’re so disjointed.)

#1

Hexeri.

It was witchcraft, it was magic, it was holiness and sin, the cloud of gray and grim that hung over the autumn land. Hexeri. As if nature itself was held in thrall by the otherworld—and it was. Stina knew that. She was a Lutheran after all. She knew that forces dark and light waged war in that other realm, that good would one
day triumph, that love would conquer all. She held fast to that belief as she clutched her cloak tight beneath her chin, spreading grain for the chickens on the ground.

#2

Notes, a hundred thousand notes, filled Varick’s ears. But each song belonged to the same woman. She had hair of pale sun and eyes of pale sky and gown of pale green and soul of black coal. Her voice had the beauty of heaven’s nine choirs, but the menace behind those perfect notes, the vice within her words, marked her as a demon from hell. And Varick was in her arms, wrapped in her hate and swathed in her hair. He was a prisoner of her embrace.

#3

Stina Warman was a summer rain in all its many forms and ways. She was the cool, wet mist on an upturned face; she was the gray of silver damask in the billowing sky above; she was the downpour you could not
ignore, soaking you to the bone; she was the calm that comes after the rain, when the skies are milky and the air is clean. She was the storm under which Johann Oppenheimer wanted to spend the rest of his days, but someone had built a roof over him.