I've finally released the sequel to From the Chrysalis. What a relief! Feeling for the Air (which also takes its title from the same Emily Dickinson poem) kind of wrote itself, but tweaking this and that and fooling around with the formatting has been maddening.
Here's the Amazon book description:
"In Feeling for the Air, Karen Black offers a remarkable sequel about the unconventional Devereux cousins, Dace who’s determined to clear his name and Liza, a gifted college student who’s still crazy in love with him. Like Black’s first book, Feeling for the Air is a rare combination of literary suspense and emotional truth. The realism and piercing psychological insight into the penal system so aptly demonstrated in Black’s debut novel From the Chrysalis is here too. When the story opens on a picturesque but perilous Ivy Lea Parkway, Dace—alleged member of the Wolfhounds motorcycle gang, riot leader and possibly a murderer— has escaped from a brand-new Canadian penitentiary built to house the “worst of the worst.” For his pregnant cousin Liza, he heads to Mexico via an Indian reserve to find out where the monarch butterflies really over-winter. Isolated by her choices and hounded by people in Dace’s hometown, Liza keeps studying while she struggles to raise their baby alone and find out who’s really persecuting Dace. Feeling for the Air is a unique novel, focusing on love and longing, want versus need and how we come to terms with our choices and the lives we're given."
Getting Feeling for the Air professionally edited really gave me the boost I needed. A big thank you to award winning Can Lit novelist Diane Schoemperlen who is also a meticulous editor and knows a thing or two about a prison town and the Canadian penal system. I still can't believe she had the time and energy to check my manuscript for plot implausibilities, missing words, consistency in spelling and font styles and the occasional misuse of lie/lay. Diane's umpteenth book By the Book has just been published to rave reviews.
