“It was the kind of murder that drove the tabloids wild.”

On Sunday around noon I wrote the last paragraph of the first draft of my third novel. Depraved Heart. Whew. It has been an intense experience and I spent the better part of the past six months working on it every weekend. Ideally, I would write every day but it just doesn't happen. I work, I blog, I promote my other books, I work on designs for my knitting books (I just charted three new lace designs I am very, very pleased with and can get ready to publish next.) So daily quality writing time is just not there.

But Depraved Heart is now written, printed out, and ready to be put away for a few weeks before the first round of editing begins. I used to hate editing but now I realize that is where the actual fun is. During the first draft I am too concerned with getting all the nuances of plot just right and the characters developed to have much fun with the writing but in the second draft everything gets to blossom. The characters come to life, the settings take on their atmosphere, the dialog sharpens, and the plot is refined and refined and refined.

As was the case with my two previous novels, a lot of surprises happened in the writing of this one. New characters showed up and did things I didn't actually plan for them to do. And, as with my previous two novels, I fell in love with my main protagonist – and with the secondary male character, too. That always happens to me. In The Old Mermaid's Tale I was in love with both Baptiste and Pio, in Each Angel Burns I was crazy about Gabe and who wouldn't love Father Pete? Now, in Depraved Heart, I have Syd and Miles.

Miles is especially interesting because he is a lobsterman, tough yet vulnerable and, oh so familiar. Writing about Miles gave me an opportunity to use a lot of bits of knowledge and stories that are now no longer available in their original form. That makes me happy.

So, I have a lot of work ahead but once again I am profoundly grateful that some of the characters in that alternate reality where characters live choose me to write about them and stuck with me as I did so. I'll probably post an extended version of this for #SampleSunday but here, I give you, the opening of my new novel, Depraved Heart:

              It was the kind of murder that drove the tabloids wild. They couldn’t get enough of it. Syd Jupiter had been one of the greatest offensive linemen in the history of American football. The six foot six, two-hundred-fifty pound half-Creole from Texas A&M was the darling of the tabloids from the time he was a first round draft pick by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Through every Super Bowl and Pro Bowl, his was the face that the newspapers loved. It was a striking face to begin with and his dry humor and ease in interviews just made him more appealing.

              During the first years of his career his name was linked with half the beauties in Hollywood including a tempestuous romance with a distinguished Academy Award winning actress who was twenty years his senior. Just about the time the public was convinced that Syd Jupiter was becoming a disreputable womanizer, he thrilled them by falling in love with the ballerina, Rachel Silver. The media loved it.

              Rachel Silver was an enigma. If Syd Jupiter was a tabloid darling, Rachel and her twin brother, Raven, were American ballet lovers’ dreams come true.

           Born on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, Rachel and Raven were the great-grandchildren of W.Q. and Lisette Ravenscroft, the legendary patrons of such artists as John Singer Sargent, Robert Vonnah, Charles Grafly, and Winslow Homer. Ravenscroft made his fortune in the Boston banking industry while Lisette, a famous beauty and bosom companion of Isabella Stewart Gardner, elevated entertaining in Boston to an art form. While the most fashionable artists and patrons of the arts summered in Manchester-by-the-Sea and Gloucester’s Eastern Point, Ravenscroft purchased half of a one hundred and fifty acre island southwest of Cape Ann and spent two decades building an estate so lavish it rivaled the castles built by the Hammonds across the water. He named it Hathor after the Egyptian goddess of pleasure.

              The first time the public saw the Silver twins perform with American Ballet Theater they believed they were witnessing magic. So perfectly did the two, beautiful dancers move together, with such grace and symmetry and fluidity of motion it was impossible to believe there were two individuals performing. Rather, it seemed, that a single, perfect creature had manifested itself. They were so alike in appearance and so attuned in motion as they floated through the pas de deux in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet that the ballet critic for the New York Times declared that they had rendered further interpretations of that ballet superfluous and a well-known fundamentalist preacher who happened to attend the performance called for a boycott of such blatant sensuality. To be continued...

Thanks for reading.