"Gina/Diane" -- Life After an Abortion

I recently published my second novella, entitled "Gina/Diane."  It is available as an e-book on Amazon and Smashwords, and as a printed paperback at The Book Patch. (Click on the names of those retailers to purchase the book.)

Here is what it is about:

When a younger man named Hartley encounters and older woman named Diane dancing with her dog on a lonely, out-of-season beach in North Carolina, he ends up unexpectedly spending the evening with her.  She's a shape-shifting cougar with a problematic pet, but she also has a poignant and disturbing story to tell about an abortion at age 17, and how that event impacted her subsequent life.

When Hartley inadvertently asks a question that opens Diane's floodgates, he finds that he has no way out of an exquisitely uncomfortable situation.  A bachelor who lives with a cat in Manhattan, empathy isn't Hartley's strongest suit and he has no prior dealing with what Diane has been through.

Thanks in part to a photo that helps him understand more about what Diane lost, he listens with increasing interest to her gritty account of how she clawed herself upward only to have her past rob her of her greatest success. Diane appreciates Hartley's willingness to listen and she's intrigued that he might be able to make good use of her story despite finding him lacking in certain important respects. Can the evening result in a rewarding outcome for them both -- and that pesky dog?

Connecting the Dots ... and James Patterson's BookShots

With this post I am going to tie together some earlier topics and point out how they apply to James Patterson's new venture, called BookShots.

In a couple of  earlier posts, which interested readers can find here  and here, I discussed the phenomenon of declining attention spans in the digital and social media age. And then, in a more recent post that can be found here, I reported on a recent study that found, among other things, that a surprising number of people never finish the novels they purchase and, in many cases, don't read much of them.