Bookish Blog Format

Once a week (at least) I share snippets from my novel in progress, and passages highlighted from the books I’m reading. Enjoy the (non-spoiler) sneak peeks from my as yet Untitled 9th Historical Novel set in Scotland and Colonial Virginia, 1730s. Be sure to check out the books I’m quoting. I highly recommend them!

From My Reading

New Morning Mercies, Paul Tripp, Jan 16: Since sin means that you are a bigger danger to you than anything else in your life and since it is impossible for you to run from you, there is only one hope for you. It is that someone with power, wisdom, and mercy will invade your life, forgive your sins, and progressively deliver you from the hold that sin has had on you. That mercy comes to you in a person, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his mercy is always fresh, uniquely fashioned for the sin struggles of this new day.

Heaven, Randy Alcorn, p442: I’ve never been to Heaven, yet I miss it. Eden’s in my blood. The best things of life are souvenirs from Eden, appetizers of the New Earth. There’s just enough of them to keep us going, but never enough to make us satisfied with the world as it is, or ourselves as we are. We live between Eden and the New Earth, pulled toward what we once were and what we yet will be… To be in resurrected bodies on a resurrected Earth in resurrected friendships, enjoying a resurrected culture with the resurrected Jesus–now that will be the ultimate party!

Happiness, Randy Alcorn, pIX: Among Christ-followers, happiness was once a positive, desirable word. Only in recent times have happiness and joy been set in contrast with each other. I believe this is biblically and historically ungrounded and has significant downsides…. Are laughter, celebration, and happiness God-created gifts, or are they ambushes from Satan and our sin nature that incur God’s disapproval? Our answer determines whether our faith in God is dragged forward by duty or propelled by delight.

Bullet Proof, Chuck Holton, p150: Paul says that “if a man cleanses himself” from unworthy purposes, he will become a useful and productive vessel in the Lord’s service. And he will be made holy. Only God can do that. But as we work to break with our old ways and sinful habits and cry out to God for His grace, He picks us up, cleans us out, and gives us a high purpose in His kingdom.

From My Writing

Excerpt from: Untitled 9th Historical Novel, Copyright 2024 Lori Benton (all rights reserved; do not copy without my permission). Note: To avoid spoilers, sometimes I’ll replace character names with X, Y, or Z but I’ll keep them consistent. X is always a particular character, as is Y, and Z.

Muttering a prayer that the rest of the cattle would stay where he left them, X took staff and torch and set out with Finn to range the edge of the night’s stance. A fresh, steaming pile of dung marked a darkened trail in the frosted heath, the passage of a heavy form headed downslope for track or burn. Either would lead back to the thatched cottages clustered below Angus Òg’s grand house, with its paneled walls, glassed windows, and stairs to rooms above the ground floor.

 

With a terse command he sent Finn out into the fog that swirled among stones and twisted heather, snaking at the edge of the torch’s light. Darkness swallowed the collie in a gulp, but soon cast up a signaling bark. X paused to fix its direction. Not on the track that climbed the glen, or upstream along the burn. As though in league with Z, the fool cow had strayed downstream.

 

The ravine. For all its tangled wildness and treacherous drops, it was a pretty place. X knew it well, having paused there every autumn he’d accompanied Grandfather on the drove road to splash in the pool below the falls with Rob, who he still saw when they passed through Port Rìgh.

 

That was the ravine in fair weather, when rain hadn’t swollen the burn or muddied the switchbacked trail to the falls. When fog and darkness didn’t conceal every precipice.

 

Finn waited at the ravine’s lip, where the trail took its downward drop through oak and ash, their crowded trunks wind-bent, moss-covered, and knee-deep in bracken browning in summer’s wake. Hoofprints in the mud confirmed his fear. If the cow hadn’t plunged to her death, she wouldn’t be getting out again without help, though it was his own brains and brawn that would extricate her. Not his dog’s.

 

Sensing a lifting of the dark, X raised his head. Directly above the fog had thinned, revealing a sky salted with stars. Though the eastern rise of moorland lay shrouded still in vapor, thick and low, above it the sky had grayed. It was later in the morning than he’d thought. They needed to reach the hilltop stone on the road south of Ùige by mid-morn, to meet Dougal and the lads coming with at least a hundred cows more.

 

X grasped the trunk of an ash, slick and cold beneath his hand, and begin the descent.

 

Days ago the burn, which looped around the clachan miles upstream, had crested its bank after a sennight’s rain on the higher moor, its waters churning with force enough to sweep away small unwary creatures. Though it had settled, the sides of the ravine dripped moisture. The ground beneath his brogues was sodden as a bog. Grasping for any tree that offered support with his free hand, the other holding aloft torch and staff, X navigated the steep trail. Torchlight revealed where hooves had slid, forcing him to lean out precariously to peer through dark growth for fear the cow had gone over.

 

She hadn’t. Her broad-horned, brindled self stood at the bottom of the ravine when X reached it. Muddied to the brisket but none the worse for straying, she drank from the pool below the waterfall that plunged stair-stepped over rocky ledges, billowing vapor and filling the clammy air with its swelling rush.

 

“Here ye be, lass,” he said, concern giving way to vexation. “What were ye thinking, risking life and limb for a drink ye could’ve had upstream, without the bother?”

 

The cow’s ears twitched in the torchlight. A light no longer needed. The nearest trees were taking shape in morning’s gray. Above the ravine’s wooded sides, away beyond the swirls of fog, the sun was near to rising. X doused the torch, letting the cow drink her fill in hopes she’d be more amenable to the climb.