Hello everyone. No, I wasn't abducted by aliens. No, ISIS did not recruit me. No, I didn't die. Life has been very full and I've been dealing with it. I finished a story over on my blog but I just haven't had the time to do much more than that. I have however got a story that I'm posting here and only here as a kind of apology for dropping off the face of the earth. It looks like there have been some changes, some new faces, some that faded into the blue like I did. It will take me a while to catch up and I may not post very much any place else but here in Storyland, at least for a while. You don't just drop off the face of the earth and then come back and expect to not have to earn your stripes all over again.

Essentially my 50s are turning out to be yet another learning experience in life. Hubs and I are more successful in business than we've ever been ... but with success comes added risks and responsibilities that have tried to chew us up and spit us out. We are now grandparents ... #2 is due the end of this month. All but the youngest kid are now adults with successes and failures of their own, though we've been blessed that mostly it is successes. My health ... eh ... you can't have everything. Still struggling with the Type 2 ... sucks that it is the genetic kind and not driven by my own bad habits. Really sucks that no matter the good habits you have you still can't "fix" what is wrong.

Hubs is the one that encouraged me to start making time, once again, for writing fiction. I've been keeping everything on my computer but just had the push to reach out to my old friends around here. So ... here is the first chapter of a story I completed last year. I'll do my best to put one chapter up a day barring any traveling hubs and I do ... something we've been doing more and more of as the kids all got older.

I do have one caveat ... I wouldn't really call this one a piece of YA fiction. There is some language but I try and not make it gratuitous. I'm trying to remember if Dennis has filters on for certain words but it escapes me so if a word offends you ... just pass over it quickly. Some characters are just a little on the salty side as I'm sure we've all run into in this life.

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