excerpt from "Glorianna"...submitted to an editor today...cross your fingers, shugar, cause your my lucky rabbit's foot...

I left the sane world behind when I lit out on the Interstate at five that morning with a full tank, the top down, and a run creeping steadily down my left thigh on a clear path to my ankle. But I had receive a call late the night before that couldn’t be ignored, “Your daddy’s dead and your momma ain’t doin’ so good.”
My daddy was dead? That man wasn’t my daddy, but no one except me ever seemed to understand that; Coop, was always just Coop. He was married to my mother when I was nine or so, and lived in the same house I did, but that’s about as far as it went. He was there, I was there, and we never really shared the same space at the same time. I didn’t call him father, sure as hell didn’t call him Daddy, and probably spoke so little to the man that I didn’t have to call him much of anything. When I referred to him at all, however, it was always as Coop, short for Mr. Cooper, just like everyone else. It wasn’t that I hated the man, but by the time Coop came along, I was old enough to have formed a few opinions of my own and accepting him as my daddy, letting him take my real daddy’s place, just wasn’t in me.