Geppetto's Daughter: What happens when a romantic hero falls in love with the writer who created him? 

 A milestone birthday and night sweats aren’t the only issues romance writer Lydia Clark is dealing with. A woman emotionally locked within herself, she has used her popular novel series to express what she avoids—her true feelings. But on this birthday, as she struggles to write the standard ending to her latest effort, a message appears on her computer screen: Why is love never enough?

After eliminating all other possibilities, she realizes it is the hero of her novels asking the question. It is Tarn Wilder calling to her, wanting her.

Is this is a cry from her subconscious to give voice to the pain she has carried for far too long? Or is it something more powerful.

The Lockpicker, a novel: 

A naïve girl, a cowboy on a train. An unlikely friendship, a tragic choice. Elements of a story that began in 1966 and would go on to span decades, impacting lives in ways no one ever could have imagined.

Something happened in the summer of 1966, when Jesse Merrill was 4, something that no one in her family will talk about, something that still terrorizes her at night, in dreams so frightening she remembers only panic and fear. 

But now, at 39, Jesse, with secrets of her own, begins to remember and slowly connects her terrors to her mother, who died that summer, and to a dark-haired woman she knows only in her dreams.

In August of 1966, fleeing California and the nightmare she’d witnessed, 19-year-old Thalia Athens sat quietly on the train heading east. Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t hear him at first. “Excuse me, m’am,” he’d repeat, and she would slowly looked up and into the deep blue eyes of the cowboy who would change her life.

Rescuing Emma B. ( in progress)

Books find me. Not just any books. Certain books by certain authors, always in a certain used bookstore. Novels secreted among other works, out of place by subject matter, out of order alphabetically: Lady Chatterley’s Lover leaning carelessly against the collected works of Samuel Beckett; Jude the Obscure sitting quietly atop a stack of children’s books; Persuasion tucked haphazardly behind a birthday card display.

I like to imagine they magically move around after closing hours and hide themselves, waiting for me…to rescue them, to take them home and keep them safe. But one title, one character has found me more than any other, the most misunderstood literary heroine of all time—Emma Bovary.

She always puts herself in my path, this time, peaking out at me beneath a pile of contemporary fiction. Yet, when I pick her up and hold her, I sense this time she needs more than a dust-free bookcase and grateful reader.

Please, I hear the whisper. Save me.