This post doesn’t have anything to with recipes. Let’s get that out right off the bat. What it does have to do with is that I (finally) published the book I wrote a bazillion (actually, ten) years ago. It’s called In the Absence of Serpents. I know sounds like a totally random title, but it’s really not. I promise. It’s pretty significant to the story, a synopsis of which follows:
To escape her former life and everyone in it, food writer Lorelai Erland relocates to a tiny, seemingly idyllic hamlet in the middle of the Rocky Mountains of northwestern Wyoming. There, she owns and operates a bookstore on Main Street, attempting to blend in and carry on a life of anonymity: a goal Lorelai soon finds is impossible to realize in the town of Langley. From the Elvis impersonator/illusionist to a woman who makes “spiritual house calls,” Lorelai begins to notice the oddities her neighbors exhibit on a daily basis. Lorelai finds kinship in Edie Waters, the hard-partying, neurotic schoolteacher struggling with a dead-end relationship of her own, and Eric Southerland, the handsome but hardheaded lawyer, also new to the town. By hiring help in the bookstore, Lorelai also provides security and protection to sixteen-year-old Skye Byrd, who desperately yearns for a more stable home life free from the clutches of her violent brother. Throughout her struggle to fit into her new life, Lorelai influences those around her in immeasurable ways.
In the Absence of Serpents is the story of one woman’s journey to reinvent herself. It’s about the human heart in isolation and the oddities of small-town America. It’s about loneliness, love, and death. In the Absence of Serpents, as I am typing this, is currently #13 in New Releases in Contemporary Literature and Fiction on Amazon, which is absolutely blowing my mind. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, it’s available to you to read for free. Otherwise, if you’re local, you can purchase it at our downtown bookstore, The Haunted Bookshop, or on Amazon.
In the acknowledgments in the back of the book, I wrote: “Thank you to those who claim they are fortunate to know me…the luck is all mine.” And it is. I’ve received such wonderful support from family, friends, and strangers about this little book. For that, I am supremely grateful. Thank you.