First your Friday fun meme.
Now some exciting news. I have finally finished the romance novella I’ve been working on for months. “And why did it take so long to write a novella?” you might ask.
For those of you who read my blog regularly, you know that I have been plagued with severe head and eye pain from Ramsay Hunt Syndrome that has limited my writing time. Not to mention my reading time, and reading is just as important as writing. This has gone on since January, and most of the winter I could not write at all. It has only been the last few months that I can spend more than an hour a day at the computer. Now, some days I can do three to four hours if I space it out.
So that is why it took months and months to write a novella, and you can imagine the thrill it was for me when I finished One Perfect Love, the sequel to One Small Victory, a few weeks ago and sent it off to be edited. I hired a graphic artist to do a cover, got the edited manuscript back, and put the book up on Amazon for Kindle. It will release November 8, and is available for PRE-ORDER now at the discount price of just 99 cents. After release the price will go up to $1.99.
Here is the terrific cover.
And here is an excerpt:
Jenny knelt in front of the small headstone, reaching out with one finger to lightly trace the inscription — Michael Jasik 1996 – 2014 – Beloved Son. It had been two years since the funeral, but there were times she forgot it wasn’t just yesterday. Those were days when the grief snuck up behind her and then slammed her in the gut like a battering ram. Those were the days when she was a total wreck. Unable to work. Unable to do much of anything except maybe breathe.
And even that was a challenge.
She didn’t know why she kept coming here. She knew Michael wasn’t here. At least not in spirit. According to the preachers of her childhood, Michael was either in heaven or hell. There was no in between with those men who spoke of a God who would rain fire and brimstone down upon the sinners of this world. Jenny always had a hard time relating to a God like that. Perhaps that’s why she stopped going to church as soon as she could move away from home and escape the mandate that “you will go to church as long as you live in my house.”
Even though she never acknowledged it, a small part of her did know exactly why she came here so often. Besides the officers at the Little Oak police department, Michael was the only one who knew that Jenny had shot a man two years ago.
Her grief was split between the loss of a son and the loss of a piece of herself.
She could share that with Michael.
She had also been able to share that with Steve. Warm, wonderful, wise Steve who had been the first man since Ralph that she had even considered as someone who could be a permanent fixture in her life. The chemistry was there. They both recognized it as they worked together on that drug task force. Then, it had been professional boundaries that kept them on either side of a distinct line. Afterward, they had tried to build something, but they both just found it too hard to try to be normal, when nothing was normal in either of their lives. So she had gone back to being a single woman without a relationship.
Most days, that was tolerable. She had her kids. And her friends. And her work. And her wonderful business partner. But it had been a long time since she had a companion, in bed and otherwise. That one person you would call first with good news, or bad, who was not your girlfriend. And someone to snuggle against in bed on cold winter nights.
A cool October breeze brushed across her face, drying the tears that had run down her cheeks in a great warm river. This was a safe place to let the tears pour out. She couldn’t do that at home in front of her other kids. They were dealing with mountains of grief in their own way. She knew that, and if they still cried, they hid it well. Not like the first year when tears cluttered the house like old newspapers and magazines that should have been thrown out months ago. The crying couldn’t continue indefinitely. She realized that, so she had started hiding her tears, trying to establish a different kind of normal that didn’t include losing emotional control at odd moments in time.
Until remnants of a white powdery substance had been found at the scene of the accident that had claimed her son’s life, she’d had no idea that the use of cocaine was so prevalent in the town. She was too busy raising three kids by herself and trying to run a business. Then the accident. Then the awareness. Then the task force. She still couldn’t believe she’d done it. When she’d joined the task force, she was numb with grief and not thinking well at all, a fact of which her mother and her best friend kept reminding her. But she’d persevered, passed the physical and helped bring down the main drug supplier for North Texas.
That’s all for today, folks. I have a busy weekend ahead of me. First an art fair where I will set up to see if folks would like autographed books for people on their holiday gift list, then Sunday visiting family all day. What are you up to this weekend?
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