Posts may be hit or miss for the next couple of weeks. After weeks of silence, we’ve had some increased interest in our home (three different parties have wanted to see the house and/or talk to the park owners) and we’re hopeful that we might finally get an offer. *knock on wood*

In addition to that, we finally were pre-approved for a mortgage by Quicken (Yay!) which means that the house hunt is in full swing. We’ve been keeping our eyes out all summer long (we have a very long favorites list), but now that we have a better idea of what our budget is, and the type of loan we qualify for, we can narrow things down.

Here’s hoping that we’ll be off on our new adventure very very soon.

In other news, I am still chipping away at the pen name project. I am down to the final three or four scenes. I want to say it’ll be done in the next week or so, but I’m afraid of jinxing myself.

I’ve also been trying to get Revenants published on Barnes and Noble. Whenever I try to publish the Nook version of the ebook it never goes through. It gets stuck on processing and then goes right back to saying ‘publish now’ a day or so later. I’ve tried contacting their support team, but I’ve never heard back from them. It’s frustrating. I could go through Smashwords, but they’re a tad bit picky about their formatting. And honestly, I prefer handling everything myself rather than relying on a third party to someday maybe push my ebook through to the bigger market.

But enough about all that – it’s WIPpet Wednesday time!

I’ll be sharing more from The Broken Man again this week. This snippet takes place shortly after the last one. Since today is the fourth of October, here are six paragraphs (1 and 0 are two numbers. 2+4=6)

Percival goes a bit slower when tutoring Cressida that night and the next. His coughing fits have returned – it seems the cold winds of the plains aren’t any easier on the lungs than the damp cold of New York. The stress of being stuck on a train with no idea what is going on in the rest of the wizarding world doesn’t help matters either. He isn’t used to being out of the loop and out of control. He also doesn’t care to be so dependant on others. He is a man of action. He wants to be out there tracking down and putting a stop to the dark wizard. However his slow recovery keeps him chained to his bed, and it chafes his psyche. Cressida can feel his frustration rolling off of him during the day time as he watches the endless snow drifts of the plains speed by.

His nightmares seem to be getting worse as a result of his setbacks. Cressida tries everything she can to distract him during her lessons, and she tries to push him in the direction of good memories once they finish for the night, but it seems that the Grindelwald is even starting to taint those. Hundreds of miles separate the two wizards, but the shadow of the dark wizard and the damage he has done looms large and it certainly doesn’t help Grave’s mood.

Though, Cressida thinks, she can’t really blame him. Try as Graves might to block her from certain parts of his mind, flashes of the abuse he suffered at Grindelwald’s hands bleeds through his walls when he sleeps and starts to taint her own dreams. In the mornings, she wakes up sore and stiff, her body aching from the curses the dark wizard enjoys inflicting on others.

As a result, Cressida is just as irritable as her tutor is. Mama won’t let up about how she needs to give Tinker another chance. About how he’s such a looker. And a good honest man – unlike some she could name. That last is always said with a glower cast in Graves’s direction. And on and on and on she goes, hour after hour. Cressida takes to sitting on the steps just outside of the door for most of that day and the next in order to escape Mama’s nagging. She knows that doing so is courting frostbite, but it’s better than blowing up at her mother. She can’t wait until they reach Barstow and she can retreat to the fortune telling tent. Unfortunately, it’s going to be another day, maybe two before they reach California; even though the manager predicted that it would only take three days, the winter weather is proving to be hard for the older engine to navigate through, and they’ve had to make additional stops for extra coal, water, and other supplies since so many in the circus were unprepared to move.

The only person who does seem to be in a good mood is Vesta. As they get ever closer to California, she seems to come out of her shell more and more and more. She’s eager to feel the sunshine on her skin, to see palm trees and the ocean, and, most important of all, to see movie stars. She seems to believe that some director will see her walking along the sidewalk and pluck her up to put her in his latest film, and so she spends her time primping in preparation for her big break.

No one has the heart to tell her that Barstow, the town they’re headed for, is about as far from Los Angeles as the tiny farm community were camped in was from Broadway.

To read more WIPpet Snippets, go here.