Becca and her Bookstack, Beth and her Fiction

Two years ago now I started a novel for adults, a book that I thought I'd finished last March, until I started it all over again.  Almost every single thing about this book has changed, but my protagonist's first name has not.  She is and she always will be Becca, a name I love, a name I feel particularly close to, thanks to my friendship with Becca of the hugely wise and always calming book blog known as Bookstack.  Becca reads fine books and she tells us what she thinks—honestly, without rancor.  Many, many of my own book purchases have been made in the wake of a Bookstack review.

Today I am blessed to be featured on Becca's Bookstack, with a truly generous review of You Are My Only.  The odd thing about this is that I had planned to write about Becca here today.  Planned to release this small excerpt from the novel that bears her name.  I am but 26,000 words into this utterly redesigned book.  I am writing slow,  letting the story find me.  But here is Becca, a snatch of fiction, surely, but written with the sense of an angel close behind me as I write.

In Siena she drank the Chianti Vin ordered.  She walked beside him, down the crowded streets, in the shuffle between shops and bicycles and flower vendors, rounds of cheese, painted porcelain, trays of marbled paper.  She walked among the bright silk flags that marked out each contrade—Unicorn, Snail, Caterpillar, Goose, Tortoise, Dragon, Eagle, Ram, Owl, Shell, Porcupine, Giraffe, Wave, Wolf, Panther, Forest, Tower—each with its own emblem and history of pride.  The colored silks hung from poles and windows.  They were draped across the shoulders of women and wrapped around the heads of men, and in every contrade, Vin bought Becca a scarf and knotted it around her waist until she wore a skirt of all Siena, and when the wind blew the colors flew up into her frames. 

She photographed second hands and steeples.

She photographed herds of butterflies.

She photographed Vin asleep, Vin in the window, framed by the quivering moon.