Wake of Echoes

I am so excited to share this news: A Place Between Breaths was awarded an Honorable Mention for genre fiction in Writer's Digest's most recent Self-Published Book competition. Nearly 5,500 books were entered in the competition and only ten books were honored for genre fiction (that combines romance, suspense, thrillers, sci fi, memoirs, mysteries, westerns, etc. -- in other words, a very competitive field). Each books was judged in six categories*, with a high score of five points. A Place Between Breaths was awarded a FIVE in every category! Here's what the judge who read it had to say (SPOILER WARNING: A minor spoiler from the prologue is in the second paragraph): I loved this story! It is a well-written, suspenseful, crime-investigation novel that also highlights the problems of border crossings, the Mexican drug cartels, dirty DEA officers and police officers as well as their truly courageous counterparts. In addition, I loved that you began with the vie...

W here are you from? It's a simple question. Most people have a fairly straightforward answer, but I am not one of them. I'm not sure I'm from anywhere. So where's my hometown? We wandered a lot when I was growing up, starting from the day I was born. (We left the hospital to go, not home, but to my grandmother's house until "home" could be established.) Then we just kept moving, never settling anywhere for long. My mom would call us gypsies, trying to make it sound fun, but there was nothing exotic about it. No cool caravan with bead curtains. No funky furniture or hippie friends. Just a discontented dad, a hopeful mother, three little girls and lots of moving boxes. I could name you the states we lived in. They all bordered America, which now makes me wonder if my dad was actually trying to get out. (Would we have stayed still if we had crossed the border and Dad found work in Chihuahua or British Columbia? I'll never know.) I could name the to...