Bookish Blog Format
Once a week 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, Feb 14: The Son of grace shines the light of his grace into the darkest recesses of our hearts, not as an act of vengeance or punishment, but as a move of forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace. He dispels our self-inflicted darkness because he knows that we cannot grieve what we do not see, we cannot confess what we have not grieved, and we cannot turn from what we haven’t confessed… Run to the light; it is not to be feared. Yes, it is the light of exposure, but what will be exposed has already been covered by the blood of the One who exposes it.
Heaven, Randy Alcorn, p466: Christ did not die to give disembodied people a refuge in the spirit realm. He didn’t rise to offer us a mere symbol of new spiritual life. On the contrary, he died to restore to us the fullness of our humanity–spirit and body. He rose to lay claim to and exemplify our destiny, to walk and rule the physical Earth as physical beings, to his glory. He died to lift Earth’s curse and rose to guarantee that the earth itself would rise from misery and destruction to be a realm ruled by righteous humanity, to God’s eternal glory.
Happiness, Randy Alcorn, p23: Baptist pastor Octavius Winslow (1808-1878) said, “The child of God is, from necessity, a joyful man. His sins are forgiven, his soul is justified, his person is adopted, his trials are blessings, his conflicts are victories, his death is immortality, his future is a heaven of inconceivable, unthought-of, untold, and endless blessedness–with such a God, such a Saviour, and such a hope, is he not, ought he not, to be a joyful man?”
From My Writing
Excerpt from: Untitled 9th Historical Novel, Copyright 2024 Lori Benton (all rights reserved; do not copy or share 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.
By the time they paused so Y could brush clean her papa’s greatcoat, the clouds had thinned. Gulls dipped on a briny breeze, testifying to the nearness of the sea.
Aside from crying seabirds and the sounds of activity from homes and plantations bordering the road, they’d walked in silence, her papa with the lute strung across his shoulder. Doubtless he felt as subdued as she by the welling of a grief and bewilderment long grappled with as they entered York Town’s bustle.
Though a longer trek from Clayfield House than was Williamsburg, until a year ago Y had visited York Town with Lucy to sell their excess garden produce and cultivated seedlings. She was accustomed to its odors—rotting fish, tar, wet canvas and wood, the tang of salt permeating all—and its clamor of shouting men, squeaking tackle, rumbling wheels, clanging iron, and the undertone of waves slapping endlessly on sand and stone and wood. The place had once put her in bittersweet mind of her first father, Adam Trueblood. He’d been a surgeon aboard a Naval vessel that had gone down at sea when she and Peyton were eight. Now the presence of the Black Swan lurked like a spider in a corner she couldn’t reach. Y shuddered as they passed the side street the tavern fronted, one lot removed from the waterfront, where sea met land in a crush of warehouses, rum-shops, and the ever-changing forest of masted ships.
While the largest vessels anchored out from shore, reachable by rowed craft, most had drafts shallow enough to moor alongside York Town’s jutting wharves. While Y couldn’t tell one make of ship from another by mast or rigging, one type was unmistakable. Only a slave ship spilled that peculiar stench of human waste, death, and misery beyond the bounds of its deck. The indiscriminate flood oozed over ship captains, seamen, and officers from the British men-o-war that guarded Virginia’s shoreline, over planters and traders, adventurers and vagrants, and York Town’s genteel residents alike.
Presently two such ships lay at anchor. One appeared emptied of its human cargo. The survivors from Africa’s shore were swept away to holding pens, awaiting sale. Shackled bodies crowded the other ship’s deck. On the gangway below, bewigged and long-coated men clutching documents spoke of profit and loss.
At the head of the wharf where the slave ships anchored, Y halted to stare at bent heads and backs, the jut of bones through wasted flesh. The shivering of those nearest was evident. Despite clearing skies, autumn’s chill lingered, made colder by a buffeting breeze off the water.
Y put a hand to the brim of her hat, threatening to come unmoored, conscious of the many layers shielding her: shift and stays; quilted petticoat and woolen gown; cloak and hose and shoes. She could spare the cloak, wrap it round the nearest shivering form… and in seconds see it snatched away and sold for whatever lucre it could fetch.
If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of thee saith unto them, Depart in peace, be thou warmed and filled; notwithstanding thee give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
Each shackled soul bore God’s image. Each held a particular reflection of his nature, his glory–so her mother had insisted, and Y believed. Yet she could offer no more than a mute plea to heaven for mercy, interrupted by a gentle grip on her arm.
