So excited, I have found the perfect publisher for my new book, "Sister Mysteries!"

I am making last-minute changes to Sister Mysteries, (otherwise known as the nun novel) because that is the nature of this book. It's fluid, it's all energy, it's alive and it has been in process for almost 135 years! (It's only taken me 23 years to write it!)

Meanwhile, I am about to sign on with a publisher that specializes in spiritual writing. And while Sister Mysteries is a "novel," it's like no novel I've ever read.  It is also a very compelling tale of a woman on a long and very rich spiritual and healing journey.

Here is the most recent tidbit I've added. You can read more bits and pieces at the Sister Mysteries blogsite. I am hoping for an April/May book release.

GINA

No warning. Here I am in the hotel bar, cradling Antonie’s bloody head.

          I look up.  I see the brass chandelier with its circle of white candles, the golden flames flickering.

         
         But wait.  How can this be? It is now 8:33 in the morning in North Egremont, Massachusetts, and I am sitting in meditation on my living room floor.

          No matter. The chandelier overhead begins spinning, so slowly I can hardly see it move.

          I close my eyes. I am trying to concentrate on my breathing, on observing my thoughts, on emptying my mind.

          Instead, I am in the hotel bar and Antonie's forehead is bleeding into the white cotton skirt of my nun's habit. 

          “Please, Tango, get the doctor!” I scream. He goes, but so slowly.

          After an eternity, Dr. Astorga is kneeling beside me, swabbing my cousin’s head with warm soapy water. He wraps the wound with a fresh white bandage that he passes beneath my cousin’s chin.  I smell iodine and alcohol and sweat.  I look up to see Señora with a basin and a rag; she is bathing Antonie’s feet.

         
          Señora and Tango and I carry him back upstairs.  Astorga has given Antonie something that has put my cousin to sleep.

         
          Tango leaves, and I tell Señora I will keep Antonie company until I am absolutely certain he is out.

         
           Señora leaves, and I settle in the chair beside his bed. I decide to pray the rosary.  I reach to my waist for my beads.  But then I realize my feet are sore, so I need to take off my shoes.

         
           I bend down to unlace the ties.  That’s when I eye the pale blue pages beneath my cousin's bed.

         
          I reach for the pages and begin to read. 

         
        “Bar Dancer.”

         
          How could my cousin, in his desperately ill state, still manage to write this filth about me?

         
          I read and read, page after page, and my head spins faster and faster.  I don’t want to be in that room anymore.  I want so much to be sitting in meditation. I don’t want to read my despicable cousin’s words.  I want to wash myself clean of his endless lies.        

         “Please, God,” I say, “let me go home.”

           I concentrate on the air passing in and out of the tip of my nose. I focus on the bed where my cousin is lying, inert. I observe the blue pages folded in my hands.

           And then it happens. I am sitting on the floor in meditation.

           Time passes. I decide to chant the vowels that correspond to each of the seven chakras in my body.

         
         The sound starts in my tailbone and it snakes up my spine to my mouth. My teeth vibrate. My tongue wallows. 

          The chanting seems like it goes on forever. It is loud enough to carry over into eternity, and certainly, into another century.