Hi Reader Friends,

The manuscript of my third Weldon novel, Every Life Filled with Purpose, will be released by Elk Lake Publishing in a few short months. This story is told from the point of view of Carson Williams, Emma Baker, and Luke Davis.   See below the back cover copy.

Welcome to Weldon, Kentucky, where no one can keep a secret forever.

Imagine discovering a place where the locals treat you with warmth and welcome you like family. Carson Williams finds such a place when he visits his deceased mother’s hometown of Weldon, KY. The atmosphere and genuinely kind people create a deep yearning in Carson, and he impulsively buys a farm in the nearby hamlet of Sassy Creek, hoping the quiet life will help him heal from PTSD.

Virginia Willoughby collapses in front of Carson at the local diner, and he meets her daughter, Emma Baker. Carson questions the magnetic pull of Emma’s gaze, while Emma wonders why she can’t stop thinking about the mysterious stranger when her heart belongs to pastor Luke Davis. When Carson learns a shocking secret, it shakes his sense of belonging. As he wrestles with the wide-reaching implications of this knowledge, Carson pushes through the trauma to finally discover where he truly belongs and God’s purpose for his life.

When I first started the novel, I thought it was a continuation of Emma and Luke’s story, but it ended up being mainly Carson’s journey. Carson, a professional gambler from Reno, is recovering from PTSD. He left Reno after being a victim in a mass shooting incident. The one thing Carson craves more than anything is peace.

Emma and Luke play major roles in Carson’s journey of healing. Many of your favorite Weldon residents are in the new story: Harley, Mrs. Virginia, Casey, Minnie, Pastor Bob, Eleanor, Ovaleta, and Dot. I’ll introduce you to new characters, Lottie and Darrel.

In Every Life Filled with Purpose, we spend time in Sassy Creek, which is made up of a cluster of homes, a feed mill, a church, and a country store. For those familiar with southern KY, Sassy Creek is comparable to South Union, KY, a little place just down the road from the farm where I grew up.

I can’t go anywhere in Franklin, my hometown, or Scottsville, where I’m the library director, without running into someone I know, and I call folks by name. That’s why I name almost everyone who enters a scene in one of my books.

Some scenes I’ve written were inspired by life. For those of you who have read Every Window Filled with Light, Emma endured a snake being wrapped around her neck during a children’s program at the library. Below is a picture of me taken this week during a library program.

I am blessed to live and work in places very similar to Weldon, where strangers are treated with warmth and genuinely kind people are the norm. Of course, there are no perfect people in my hometown or in Weldon. We can be prideful, we gossip, and we whine, but when tragedy strikes, we come running to help, and bow our heads in prayer. We are a community of people who stand for the national anthem at sports events, open meetings with prayer, celebrate the 4^th of July with a parade honoring veterans, and we never replace Christ with an X when writing Merry Christmas.

In a few weeks, I’ll be recruiting a launch team, and if you’ve read my first two novels, I hope you apply. In the meantime, you can meet Carson in my novella, A Fork in the Road. I think you’ll like Carson and his dog Moby. Click on the book cover to download it for free. You’ll have to enter your email address to subscribe to my newsletter/blog, but if you received this message, you’re already a subscriber.

Thank you for taking the time to read my Weldon update. If you have a prayer request, please let me know. It is an honor to lift petitions for you and your family.

May God richly bless you and those you love.

Warm regards,

Shelia