Teaser Tuesday: From the Archives

As I was cleaning up my Documents cache recently, I came upon a file intriguingly labeled “Eloise for Later Pink”.

I do things like that. Every now and then, a bit of dialogue or an idea for a future book will grip me, and I’ll have to scribble it down before I lose it. And then I stick it in a file and forget about it. In this case, I’d clearly started writing the first Eloise and Colin chapter for a later Pink book. But which one?

The fragment is dated (in Eloise and Colin time) February 2004, which is around the same time as the action in The Betrayal of the Blood Lily. So this might– just might– have been an original opening to Blood Lily, put aside and then forgotten by the time I actually got around to writing the book. Or it might have been intended as a frame to something else, like an expanded version of Bunny & Biscuits: A Very Dorrington Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure. (What I do know is that it can’t be the lost frame to The Mischief of the Mistletoe, since that was set in New York at Christmas.)

For your amusement, here’s the lost opening to an unspecified Pink book….

Prologue

February, 2004

“Maybe I should add a serial killer,” said Colin.

I looked up from the shopping list I was making for our very first couples’ cocktail party. “I was thinking more like brie,” I said. “Although it probably has the same effect on you in the long run.”

“No, for the book. It’s just missing… something.”

I could have told him what that something was, but he was my boyfriend, and I was rather embarrassingly fond of him (we weren’t at the stage where I could say “love” yet), so I didn’t say it. What he was lacking was a plot. Oh, a lot of stuff happened. There were villains diving for cover right and left and high speed chases and powerboats and machine guns and glamorous Middle Eastern women who might or might not be double agents, but he was two hundred pages in, and none of these things ever seemed to go anywhere. Despite the speed at which they were moving. Colin’s characters seemed to think it a matter of honor never to move at less than one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. I didn’t even like to think what that translated into in miles.

And now I’m off to have some brie and get back to work on Pink XII… our final installment in the Pink series!

1 Comment

  1. Sheila on December 30, 2014 at 4:37 pm

    What fun! But I hate seeing rose words
    “Final” and “Pink” I’m the same sentence

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