CEMETERY TREES

I'm close to finishing a new book, a family suspense called CEMETERY TREES. It's about a young woman who, after a troubling adolescence and many years of estrangement in adulthood, returns to the small town where she grew up with an irascible father. It's a reunion that leads to devastating results.

She knew it wasn't true what they said about home being a place where if you had to go there, they had to take you in. Good girl/bad girl Jacobina Valeska couldn't count on being taken in. Nor did she want to go back to the heartache and painful memories waiting for her there. If her only other option hadn't been a cardboard box under the 14th Street Viaduct with her nine year old son and a three legged German Shepherd, she never would have dragged herself home at all.

But she did.

She returned to the place where nobody called her by her beautiful name - Jacobina. They called her Jake, sometimes Jerk. It was the place where her mother ran off with the local sheriff leaving Jacobina with her father. Jacobina was six. Her father was pissed.

Now it's fifteen years later. Within days of her return, she's insulted, assaulted and accused of theft and murder, her son finds a body in the rock quarry, her search for her mother is thwarted at every turn, and she discovers that everything she knew about her past wasn't true.

Welcome home, Jacobina.

I know how the book is going to end, how it has to end. I'm just not sure how to get there, so I'm taking a few days off to let the final scenes come together in my head. I'll update my website, post on my blog, and attend to the dozens of other little tasks that have been set aside while I worked on this book.

While I'm doing that, two things will be going on at the same time. Of course, I'll actively think out scenarios in my mind, but for the most part the scenes will write themselves in the ether of my unawareness. They will come to me in the shower, or while I'm on the treadmill, or I'll come awake in the middle of the night with the scenes and the dialogue fully formed in my mind.

But however it happens, the pictures and words will suddenly be there, and I'll drop everything else and sit down at the computer to write the final chapters.

And then euphoria!

And the next book!