New Book Cover & Excerpt!

Greetings Blogger Friends! 

Just wanted you to know that I’ve been trying to keep up with many of your blogs and of course I keep discovering new ones! Wish I had more time to read them, especially on a daily basis.

Got my new cover design and have put it on this profile and over on Facebook, but for your convenience, here it is...

NOTES FROM NADIR will be coming out toward the end of September – don’t have an exact date yet. I’ll let you know when I do.

Meanwhile, here’s another excerpt that dates back to the beginning of my stay in Nadir.  

February 2009 - “Job Hunting In Hell”

Before Mom left for her part time office job at a nearby school, she made sure my laptop was hooked up and I was able to get online there and not on her old Dell PC from the turn of the century. Only a few months ago she had changed from dial-up to DSL!

As she was a senior citizen, she worked at her secretarial job no more than two hours at a time. Wasn’t much time at all, but at least I’d have the place to myself between the hours of 10 and noon. Oh yeah, and the maximum commute time of maybe 12 minutes gave me a little extra. In the old days, she would have walked there—but in the old days she worked 40-plus hours per week.

I lingered over tea and toast and took in the ambiance the gas fireplace created. All I did was flick on a switch, observe the manmade logs and flames imitate a real fire, and about 15 minutes later the fan clicked on and expelled heat. It was right next to the table so I was able to have breakfast in warmth. But I got so relaxed I miscalculated my time as I was reading another Charlaine Harris mystery I’d bought before I left entitled Shakespeare’s Christmas. I liked the heroine, Lily Bard, and she had her own cleaning service which meant she was self-employed. Reading about other places than the Left Coast sort of prepared me for being here. But only sort of. As I was engrossed in the adventures of a small town gal, I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone.

The sight of Mom coming inside lugging her canvas library bag made me feel guilty. I was supposed to be looking for work not lingering over breakfast was the vibe I got but she didn’t say it. When I returned to the sun room, I never referred to it as my room, I got online and began job hunting by emailing resumes. Mom thought I was “playing.”

Being the old-fashioned sort, she lectured: “You have to go out and look for a job. You can’t do it online they won’t remember you. Go out and you’ll stand out.” She also wanted to get rid of me, I reasoned.

I did so, spending the time driving around the area and familiarizing myself with where the farmland began and where the city ended. I was just driving and driving and looking at places where I wanted to work and seeing if there were any help wanted signs. In the age of the internet who hunted for jobs on foot or in a car? Yeah, I’d found my first job, even my third and fourth job that way – during the pre-WWW era.