A Bit of Introduction

I’ve decided to set aside the theme of my garden for a while; maybe I’ll return to it in some blogs later on. Thus far, I really haven’t talked much about my first book, TEN DAYS.

To introduce the book to those of you who haven’t read it - it’s about people trapped in a capital city.  They are surrounded by a cruel, brutal enemy, with no real possibility of escape.  The book is called TEN DAYS because as the story begins they think they have ten days to two weeks to live.

Without having experienced such an event myself, I’ve wondered what it’s like to be in that situation. There have been numerous similar events throughout history.  The people of Berlin had to wonder how they would be treated in the last days of the Third Reich.  Their city had been reduced to just a little more than piles of rubble. The Russians would soon enter, and after the German atrocities visited upon Russian civilians they had to wonder if they were going to experience retribution.  

 

The Russian (USSR) flag waves over the ruins of Berlin.

In the mid-70’s, the civilians of Phnom Penh and Saigon waited the arrival of Enemy forces, not knowing what to expect.  We know the Killing Fields followed the fall of Phnom Penh. What’s it like to await that unknown fate? 

While I doubt most of us will ever face those circumstances, what about those of us who receive word of a terminal illness? There are the different stages of grief even while our loved one fights on. In TEN DAYS I take the residents of this fictional capital city through most of those stages.

Whether it’s battling illness, loss of our income, or the extreme, the impending fall of a capital city, we all long to discover the new “normal” and learn to accept it.  It’s where you’ll find the main characters in TEN DAYS.

I want to take my readers through a broad range of emotion; tenderness, fear, joy, despair.  If I’ve done my ‘job’, they will enter into the lives of the people of the Capital City and come away changed on some level.