Day #338 It was a Dark and Stormy Night...

This is so much fun! The dog stuff, I mean.

In two more days the Walton Animal Guild is having an open house to show off their new facility, and I’ll be there to talk about my Violet as an Amethyst, my upcoming book that’s going to star one lucky dog.

Would you like a sneak preview? Shh! Don’t tell anybody... but here are the first few paragraphs:

--a brief excerpt from CHAPTER 1 of

Violet as an Amethyst © 2011 Fran Stewart

It was a dark and stormy night, dammit, and I was stuck, gasping for air, desperate for warmth, wedged between two branches of a drowning pine tree as the rain-swollen Metoochie River tried its river-like best to uproot the nearly-submerged tree and drown me. If it didn’t freeze me first.

I had no idea who had pushed me from the dock, but I knew I hadn’t simply slipped. A moment after I’d sensed I wasn’t the only one standing there watching the surge of the storm-water, two big hands hit the middle of my back.

What on earth had I been thinking, to take a walk at 2 a.m. when I could have stayed curled up next to Bob? Obviously I’d lost my mind, and now I was paying for it.

I prayed for a convenient lightning bolt to strike the man who’d pushed me, whoever he was. I prayed for dawn. I prayed for a friendly boater or a sudden river-drying drought. My only chance was to hang on and hope for rescue. I screamed for help again and again, but heard no answer above the roar of the river. Visions of Snoopy, pounding away at his typewriter on top of his red-roofed cartoon doghouse, careened around inside my muddled head. It was a dark and stormy night; it was a dark and stormy night. I couldn’t get beyond that first stupid sentence.

 Doesn’t that sound like fun? I couldn’t resist starting the book with a cliché, but tweaking it slightly, with the “dammit,” so it wasn’t totally a cliché. Wait’ll you read the end! … um … and the middle, too.

 What does this have to do with bees? Well, Biscuit’s husband, Bob, the town cop, gets talked into taking over some hives that belonged to a newly-deceased town member. But then, there’s this dead body that … Shh, Frannie! Don’t give that away.

BEEattitude for Day # 338:

       Blessed are those who anticipate good things, for they shall be eternally hopeful.
  

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Green as a Garden Hose, the 3^rd Biscuit McKee Mystery,

is now available in mass market paperback

from World Wide Mystery, a division of Harlequin.

(Go to www.eHarlequin.com and search for Fran Stewart)

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Get Your Dog in My Next Book!

From now through the end of September, anyone who donates $10 to WAG, also known as the Walton Animal Guild, will be automatically entered in a drawing.

If you win, your dog will be in my next Biscuit McKee mystery!

http://www.wagwalton.com

The donate button is right on their home page

Every $10 donation is automatically entered in the drawing

See Blog #324 for the details.