Want To Read a Snip of the New Work in Progress?

What a long, hot summer it has been! It was the second hottest summer on record in my neck of the woods, here in Fargo, North Dakota, USA. It cooled down nicely in the past week, although Sunday is expected to be 93 (about 33 or 34 Celsius). Of course, some of you are probably welcoming spring about now.

I have kept myself very busy during this long hot summer. The day job has been (as always!) stressful. I did write quite a lot for the first half of the summer, and that was fun. The second half found me buried under other stuff. Like playing with Little Miss Dottie, my new kitten. That should be fun, but I am her favorite chew toy, so… But what is not at all fun is cleaning out my mom’s house to get it ready to put it on the market. Man, my mom was *this close* to being a hoarder. The realtor’s photographer is coming on Wednesday 9/22/21 to do pictures and that is the day it is officially for sale. So tomorrow I go once again to do some final cleaning. You know, washing windows, scrubbing the registers and switch plates, etc. Part of me hates to see it go. My family lived in that house for 45 years! But it will also be good to have it gone. Then I will be able to get back to a more productive writing schedule!

So… Writing news. I am about 2/3 done with the rough draft for The Storm King. My goal was to have the rough draft done by September 1. Yeah. Not so much. To get myself back into it, I am going through the rough draft chapter by chapter and doing some self editing. I thought I would share the first three chapters with you here. This is still very rough but I hope you will enjoy it.

The Storm King, the Lords of Erebir, Book 1

Jerriel of Erabir is a warrior king who was captured by his enemies when he was a teenager and made their slave. The enemy governor’s daughter fell in love with him and helped him escape. He swore to come back with his father’s army to avenge himself and to take her home to be his wife. Now, ten years later, he has conquered his enemy, city by city, and has taken brutal revenge on those who enslaved him. All that is left for him to do is find his Lady Valdis and live happily ever after.

But Ashley Johnson is not Valdis. She is an older-than-average college student who used to write dreamy romances to while away her time in the treatment rooms at the cancer center. She never finished the story of Jerriel and Valdis, but now that she has somehow been dropped in the middle of the world she created when she was sixteen, she’s going to find out how it ends.

This Jerriel is nothing like the sweet teenager she made up. She is not the beautiful noblewoman she wrote about. Can they each learn to love the true self of the other?

Chapter One

I was so close. After way too many years I was almost done with school. I let out a breath and closed my laptop before looking across the table at my roommate who was also my best friend. “Maya, I am finally going to get my degree.”

The sound of the coffee grinder at the other end of the coffee shop almost drowned out my words, but Maya looked over the top of her own laptop and smiled. “Yeah, you are.  It’s been a long, hard road, but you are almost there, and you’ve fought like heck for it. You deserve it.”

Tears stung my eyes. It had been a long, hard road. I hadn’t graduated from high school until I was nineteen, hadn’t started at the university until I was twenty, and now would be getting my BA at twenty-five. At the same age, Maya was working on her doctorate.

“I’m a little old to be getting my first degree.”

My best friend blew a raspberry. “Ashley, you’re not old. There’s a woman in one of my classes who must be pushing sixty. I think you are amazing. Consider what you went through. A lot of people would never have gotten this far.”

I glanced away, pretending to check out the coffee shop. I didn’t want to think about ‘what I went through’. Keeping up with my schoolwork after being diagnosed with ALL—Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia—at fifteen had been impossible. My normal had gone from giggling with Maya about nail polish, hairstyles, and boys to chemotherapy infusions, baldness, and bone crushing pain.

Maya pointed a finger at me, its perfectly rounded nail painted a glaring purple. “I know what you are thinking. But that is done. You are cured. Your hair is halfway down your back—it is gorgeous, by the way, you witch, so thick and glossy, like polished walnut—and you are about to have your B.A.”

I had to laugh. My hair was medium brown, boring brown, and I usually wore it in a high ponytail that brushed my back a few inches below my shoulders. All the weight I’d lost during my fight with leukemia was back. Sadly, it had all taken up residence in my midsection. I was just a little over five three, and my legs were long and slim compared to my poochy belly. My eyes were brown, too, but I liked to thing they were a pretty shade of brown, almost golden brown, with a slight tilt at the outer corners. They were the only beautiful thing about me. Maya, on the other hand, was a tall blonde with sky blue eyes and a slender, hourglass figure. She looked like a bimbo, but her mind was brilliant. She was getting a PhD in chemistry. I was pretty sure bimbos had no interest in being chemists. Only the fact that she was the best friend anyone could ever have prevented rabid jealousy from blackening my heart. At sixteen, when most girls spent an hour every morning getting their hair ready for school, Maya had shaved her beautiful blond hair off to give me moral support when my hair fell out in clumps from chemo. See? Best friend ever.

Let me know what you think. Please be kind! As I said, this is just the rough draft 🙂 I hope you have a wonderful weekend!