A birth announcement

Well...it's done. My third novel, CHOICE, has just been published on Kindle.

The feeling is somewhere between giving birth and sending your child off to school for the first time. The book and I have lived together so long in solitary confinement, that it is with mixed feelings I launch it into the greater world. Yes, that was why I wrote it...that it might see the light of day in someone's hands other than mine. But still.

Given these feelings, as well as the subject matter, there's a certain synchronicity that CHOICE comes out today, Mother's Day, as it is the story of  a woman whose former lover’s death forces a re-examination of her life, including the question of whether to tell her daughter the truth about her parentage.

About CHOICE: 

What happens when the fallout of a long-past relationship threatens to destroy everything in your current one?                                                                                                                                                             
Jody Carpenter Maclain’s daughter has never known she was the product of one humiliating sexual experience that drove her father, Keith Ackerson, out of the closet and Jody into a lifetime of self-recrimination. While Jody later meets and marries Alex Maclain, when Keith learns he has fathered a child he insists upon being involved in their daughter Kendall’s life. Jody, Keith and Alex come to an agreement: When Kendall turns twenty-one, the three of them will tell her the truth of her parentage.

No one could guess that Keith would die a year shy of that milestone birthday.

Keith’s death throws Jody into a tailspin of long-buried emotions. In the wake of her choices past and present, she wavers over the biggest question: Need she tell Kendall the truth now?  The consequences of her hesitation are swift and agonizing, and Jody faces an ultimatum: Unless she can extract herself from Keith’s shadow and expunge her culpability, the price of her self-doubt may be the loss of all she loves best.                                                   


Though I am not a biological mother, CHOICE is in many ways an immensely personal book for me. Partly because I wrote it in first person, so in the writing, I either became Jody or she became me.(I truly think that some characters come to life in the writing and merely use we scribes as their channel.) And partly because of the settings and circumstances, many of which echo or approximate my own. In the writing of the book, I, as Jody, fell in love with Keith, Alex, Kendall and Blake in turn. Though Jody's story is not mine, it consumed me in the writing. I can only hope that a reader will become equally involved.

The feeling of sending the manuscript off is bittersweet. My labor is done, and I'm mentally and physically exhausted...but also intensely relieved. It's time for this little baby to walk without me.

So I'm celebrating!!!!  Bring on the champagne!!!

Order CHOICE from Amazon.com by clicking here. I welcome your comments!

And Happy Mother's Day!


Comments

  1. Everything you say about putting your baby out there is so true. Pass the champagne over and I'll celebrate Choice's birth with you.

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