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.

A couple bits of news. First of all, the fabulous book blog Debuts and Reviews, which I’ve had the honor of contributing to, is now gone. Tia, Supreme Overlord of Debuts and Reviews, is a published author now (yay!), and her busy schedule makes it nigh impossible to run a book blog and still keep up with her writing. So I am no longer doing book reviews. But the URL is still alive and well, as Tia is using it as her author blog, so do visit.

On the writing front, things are going quite well, other than that I’m on a bit of a delay. Back when I wrote my first draft of Hex in 2007, I never imagined that at the time of my revision, I would be going through the same tragedy as one of my characters in the book. It kind of hampered my progress. At first, it was too difficult to write. After that, it was actually kind of theraputic, but I had to watch myself and make sure that everything I was putting into those scenes was essential to the scene and the book, rather than letting myself drone on and on, and letting my own feelings about the situation get in the way. But! I am at last finished, and submission will soon commence. So keep your fingers crossed.

I’d like to start monthly reading posts again soon, but I’ll have to wait until things slow down a bit first. I will tell you that I read Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings and looooved it, and that I read Kristen Britain’s Blackveil (Green Rider 4) and am so, so mad at a bunch of Sacoridians! I spent much of yesterday yelling for King Zachary to cut off people’s heads. (And so I must say that the book is good, well-written, and awesome, but I would feel weird saying that I liked it because I’m furious at a bunch of fictional people for doing terrible things to other fictional people. And I’m going to stop ranting now, but if anybody who’s read it wants to have a nice long chat about this book, we can start a special thread.)

Hope everybody’s new year is going swell, and happy early Valentine’s Day!

After moving my site to WordPress, it was only a matter of time before I moved my blog here as well. The LJ account is staying open for now, but I’ll only be using it to comment on other LJ blogs. So if there’s an entry you want to reread for some reason, it’s still there.

Things will be a little different on this new blog than they were at the old. I’d really slacked off on my blogging lately, in part because I was reevaluating how I wanted to spend my time online. (You are now seeing the result.) Expect me to blog here every 1-2 weeks for now.

In the meantime, you can still find me reviewing books at Debuts and Reviews. I might start posting notices whenever one of my reviews goes up (which will not count as one of my regular posts).

Have a joyous day.