I just finished writing Year of the Dog ! It had a massive plot hole that I had to fix which turned out to be more work than I expected. Here’s a snippet: “Hey, Auntie Nell.” He wrapped his arms around her, bussing her on the cheek and breathing in pikake flowers and shortbread cookies. And suddenly he was nine years old again, and her solid presence had made his chaotic world stable once more. “What are you doing here?” He usually took her to dinner on Wednesday nights, but today was Tuesday. The edges of her smile faltered a little before brightening right back up again. “What, I can’t visit my nephew?” She angled around him to enter his home. “Is this your new house? Looks lovely.” Which was a blatant lie, because the fixer-upper was barely livable, much less acceptable to a neat-freak like his aunt. She also left four matching pink and purple floral suitcases on the stoop behind her. Only then did Ashwin notice the cab driver standing slightly to the side of the walkway. “Can ...
She was used to hiding. She’d had to hide who she was, it seemed all her life—from her own parents, from most of her family. People had seemed to constantly remind her that she wasn’t quite right. That she was different.Her father had been disappointed that she wasn’t charming, that she was too quiet and uninteresting. Her mother had been upset that she’d been hopeless at catching a husband during her season. Felicity disliked her so much that she was eager to foist her off rather than keeping an unpaid servant.
And aside from all that, there was the one secret no one could know, the one sin she could never rub out.
—From The Spinster's Christmas
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