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 23: What are you asking of something when you place your hope in it?… People can love and respect you, but they can’t give you life. Situations can make your life easier, but they can’t give you life. Locations can bring some changes to your life, but they can’t give you life. Achievements can be temporarily satisfying, but they can’t give you life… Hope is not a thing, not a location, not a situation, not an experience. Hope is a person, and his name is Jesus.

Heaven, Randy Alcorn, p452: Don’t let a day go by without anticipating the new world that Christ is preparing for us. God loves the Heaven bound, but he is proud of the Heaven minded: “They were longing for a better country–a heaveny one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:16).

Happiness, Randy Alcorn, p13: When I was young, fantasy stories appealed to my desire for something great and wondrous outside my experience. I longed for Eden before I understood there had been an Eden. I ached for God before I believed in God. I embraced the gospel because it so perfectly corresponded with what I longed for. I’ve studied many worldviews, but none comes close to the biblical worldview in accounting for all the facts of our existence–including our longing for happiness.

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.

Despite the day’s soot-clouded chill, he was sweating when the track’s last climbing bend brought him past the ridges of the inner rigs. He sighted the cottages nestled below the rise where Jenny’s home, though built of the same stone and thatch, rose nearly twice their height. He passed the beaten path leading up to it, making for the cottage of his birth. And there was his good dog to greet him, rising from the threshold, feathered tail sweeping.

 

“Aye, then, lad,” X said, stooping to fondle the dog’s shaggy ruff. He felt the prick of entangled burs. Moving lower, the prominence of ribs. “Miss a meal to two along the road, did ye?”

 

But he’d stopped at each stance and paid the folk there for the keep of his dog on the homeward route. None had said they hadn’t seen Finn or offered the dog food.

 

Entering the cottage, he set staff, bow, and quiver against the wall, then paused to take a breath, scenting the air. Stale peat fire. Dust. Chill. The tang of cow droppings.

 

Grandfather’s cottage—as he still thought it—had no hearth built against a wall, nor chimney to funnel out the peat smoke. Their hearth was the old kind, a stone-lined pit in the center of the floor with a kettle suspended from a roof beam. The single room was open to the rafters where smoke drifted out, eventually, through thatching. There was a table for work and eating, two chairs, chests for clothing and tools and foodstuffs, and a bed built into the wall separating the living quarters of man and beast.

 

He’d no sense that anyone had been inside the cottage, at least this side, while he’d seen the drove across Kyle Rhea and Rob settled in his place.

 

He passed into the byre where his remaining cattle, brought down from the shieling pastures, would winter, surprised when horned heads lifted, brown eyes peered through tousled forelocks. One heifer gave a bellow at sight of him. They ought to have been put out into the harvested rigs to graze the stubble there. They’d feed enough in their troughs at present and were placidly munching away at it. Winter stuff that should be held back for now, for when other forage grew scarce. A closer look revealed the packed earth around their hooves hadn’t been mucked in days.

 

Such neglect wasn’t like Jenny MacDonald. Not like at all.