When resolutions lead you astray…
Happy new year to you, and here’s to a 2025 that’s full of good fortune.
We’re entering the first full week of the year, and for resolution makers, it’s when the rubber hits the road on their New Year’s promise to themselves. The holidays are over, vacations have come to an end, and we’re all returning to the “real life” of back to school, back to work, back to our usual routines.
This is when we find out if our resolutions will stand the test of time, and for how long. Are you a resolution maker? How’s it going?
I’m not usually a resolution maker. I always feel like any day is a good day to decide to make a change to my life, and I don’t like to pressure myself with big, unrealistic expectations.
Belle, however, has a rather significant moment at the beginning of BELLE where she makes a sort of resolution. It’s what we in the fiction business call “the inciting incident.”
Belle’s inciting incident
Her husband Mads (the first husband of many) pulls an insurance swindle that leaves them temporarily homeless, and then he brings Belle to the new home he bought with the payout. Belle expects it will be her dream home he has been promising her for years, but it turns out to be only marginally better than the apartment they left. Mads tells her he used the rest of the payout money to invest in a business he insists will bring impressive dividends. He tells her he’ll have the money to buy her anything she wants “in a few more years.”
A few more years? “She’d been waiting all five years of their marriage, his promises for their future among the reasons she’d said yes in the first place, that and his status as a business owner. The insurance money should have finally been their big chance. How could he have wasted it on this shabby embarrassment?”
Mads tries to mollify her, claiming the investment was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he learned of only recently. Belle is downhearted, but she wants to be a good wife and so sets her disappointment aside, determined to support her husband.
But one day while cleaning house, Belle comes across some papers that reveal Mads’s lie about the timing of his involvement in the new investment. Belle realizes he’d actually been planning it for months.
This changes everything
It’s this lie, in combination with a few others and his callous treatment of her over the years, that prompt her resolution:
“She took her tea into Mads’s office and sat at the great rolltop desk. She spent the afternoon poring over page after page of letters back and forth, proposals and counter-proposals, contracts and binding agreements. Most of it was very dull, but two documents caught her attention. She read them twice through and then a third time to make sure she understood correctly.
Belle let the papers fall. What she had just read was a truly remarkable stroke of luck. And it changed everything.”
This moment is what sets Belle on her path to independence and success (as she defines it) and ultimately leads to her murderous method for achieving that success.
Pub day coming up!
BELLE comes out in less than a month on February 4 (ack!), and I’m working on a plan to celebrate the day, and lining up some places you can come see me. Keep your eyes peeled for announcements in upcoming newsletters. If you have a book group and you’re interested in having me visit, you should be able to reply to this email, or you can email me directly at jen at jennifergossduby dot com.
Word of mouth is the best way for people to hear about a book. So if you enjoy these letters and like what you hear about BELLE, the best way you can support the book is to let other people know.
