Dear Reader,

Once upon a time…well, actually, a couple of years ago, I began a weekly writing exercise on my blog (leeniebrown.com) and called it Thursday’s Three Hundred. What was supposed to be just a few minutes of practice – just three hundred words a week – quickly took on a life of its own and became something much grander.

To date, those writing exercises have produced one short story (Hope at Dawn), a four-book series (Willow Hall Romance), a stand-alone novella (With the Colonel’s Help) and now, this novella that you hold in your hand, which is either the first of a pair of stories or the beginning of something a bit longer.

While some things about how I create these stories have evolved since that first writing exercise, the tradition of posting a portion of a work in progress continues each Thursday. In fact, there is a new story posting there now.