S is for SPIRIT - P is for PERCEPTION - I is for . . .

I hadn't intended to write a series. SPIRIT was intended to be a way for me to work out some personal issues. Trauma, predominantly. Reoccurring trauma, particularly. If you read SPIRIT, you'll know what I'm driving at. It is possible to be brought to ones knees and get back up. Try it again. Not as easy. Not without support. Not without a close circle of friends and family.

That's Lucy Price. She's the strongest of them all.

Years ago a stranger plucked a slip of paper off her cork bord and handed it to me, saying how it had helped her through a difficult time. It said, You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.

Interestingly enough, it helped. Now I keep that posted where I can see it while I write. This is what gave Lucy the strength time after time.

PERCEPTION is the second book in the SPIRIT series. My protagonist, Mia Ellis, is strong in her own right.

When Mia's father has a stroke, she's called back to see him and confronts him on all the ways he's failed her. "I always hated you," she says.

Abandoned by him before birth, Mia was brought up by a single mother in Haiti. They lived with her uncle whose threat of "Tell no one," when she was five, turned into a lifetime of resentment for the American father she'd never known. But when tragedy struck, she was sent to live with him, a world away from everything she knew.

She was fifteen. They were strangers. For the next eight years, she did her best to stay out of his way. Then she found her own way in the world, leaving him and the dysfunction far behind.

After leaving the hospital, Mia returns to his home to search for his legal health directive, she finds a trove of his personal journals. Her hateful words taste toxic after learning that the man she'd spent a lifetime resenting was not the man she thought at all.