Future Works

The girl was only eighteen but she had been special since her birth as the first half human, half alien hybrid. The problem was, no one asked her what she thought of the constant interviews, appearances, tabloid lies or the hundreds of thousands of staring eyes she had to endure every day. Finally, she realized she had to leave or die as depression began to take over her life. Stowing away on a beat up star freighter, she began a journey that would change her life forever....and bring mankind to the brink of extinction. Her voice opened doors, gave her food and passage, saved her life more than once, and touched every soul in the galaxy...

Arpeggios in the Darkness explores the conflicts, joys and terrible dangers facing a girl alone in the universe and the wonderful gift she has to come to terms with.

The ship’s fan sucked up the smoke curling from the gun in the old woman's hand. The blood pouring from the floating dead man moved a little more slowly.
“What are you doing on my boat?” she said to the terrified girl bobbing by the body.
“I’m...”
“I know who you are, princess.” She glanced at her torn dress, his open fly, and growled at the dead man. “Just had to do it, didn’t you, asshole? Rand, take this piece of shit and put him in the cooler. Any family?”
“No, Captain.”
" F***ing hooray.” She dragged Mousikós down the gravline.

Megan McCormack-Smith lost her two sons to a plane crash and spent several months in the hospital after a nervous breakdown preceded by hallucinations. Once recovered, she and her husband find themselves the owners of an old bed and breakfast in Bandon, Oregon. They decide to walk away from their lives in the city to try and recover their shattered lives in the beautiful beach town. Lord Bennett's Inn is charming and begins to take away the crippling pain. But two uninvited guests at the Inn turn their world upside down and the ghostly encounter will challenge their love, their trust, and their sanity.
This is a story about how strong the bond of love can be...and how life can be as frail as ash.

*****

Bandon was a small, gray beach town tucked away in the sand dunes of Southwestern Oregon. It had once been strong with timber and cranberries, but deforestation, decline and despair had left it scarred and bleeding, clawing a meager existence out of the few that came in the summer to play golf and linger by the sea. The problem was not the town itself…it had a strange reputation for drawing in very interesting people, and the place, if you could survive, fueled the spark of life and creativity as no where else. No, the problem with Bandon was it had too many dreams, but not enough time.

Meagan Smith’s uncle, Ulysses Randal Merchant, had been born that day in 1936 when the town was razed to embers by wild gorse fires ignited by ignorant fools and he had died on the day of the black migration, when gulls darkened the skies in a swath 20 miles wide along the ocean seeking warmer days and nights in the south. He had been a farmer all his life, growing sour red cranberries that he harvested from flooded bogs and long days of labor, but he had managed, after unspoken transactions in dark taverns, to purchase the plum of the southwestern coast…Lord Bennett’s Inn. Lord Bennett had founded Bandon and named it after the home he had left behind in Ireland. Uncle Ulysses died at the Inn from an abundance of life and too much gin, the day after the Inn was ready for lodgers. It had been nearly 100 years since the last guests had arrived and they would wait five more before Meagan and her husband descended on the place to begin again.