If you can't find what you want, build your own!

   I've heard of people who can't find a product or service they want, and so they go on to invent or design what they want. Earthen Vessels is a little like that. I wanted to read a very specific type of fiction and couldn't find an author or work that was what I had in mind. I was searching for a perfect balance, a little like Goldilocks [The first bowl was too hot, the second bowl was too cold, but this one is just right]. 
   I wanted it to be sexy but not raunchy, light and amusing without being comical. I wanted to share a message or two without being preachy. You don’t have to read with a dictionary beside you, but it still engages your grey matter. It has a romantic element, but it’s not a romance in the traditional sense.
   When people ask, that’s what I say is special about the book: it’s a balanced mix of many great story-telling elements. 
To wit: 
This is from about page 100. Luis and Maggie are off in their own respective dream-lands.




That night Luis lay in his bed, unable to sleep, listening for every sound Maggie made from the other side of the thin curtain. When he did manage to get to sleep, he dreamed that he was once again making his way to the sound of a woman’s scream - or was it a man who made that terrible noise? He came upon Maggie on the ground with Raul on top of her. Instead of a shard of glass, she held an arrow at his back. Luis wasn’t sure what she was wearing - something with feathers. He didn’t say anything, but she’d heard him approach, and she looked straight at him.
“I came to rescue you,” he informed her. Just then she pushed Raul off of her with the strength of several men. He yelped as his body was hurled several feet up, and he landed with a thud on his back. He groaned loudly and crawled off into the jungle.
“Rescue me?” Her voice was full of annoyance. “What you’ve done is interrupt me.”
“I have?” he asked, flabbergasted.
“Now you scared him off.”
“I did?”
“But never mind,” she smiled. “You’ll do just as well.”
“I will?”
“Maybe better,” she purred, and by the time she had her arms wrapped around his neck, they were inside his house, in front of the fire. Her kiss was wonderful, but still he pulled back, startled. He fell backwards, landing on his bed with her straddling him. He woke up in a sweat a few minutes later, his heart beating wildly and his head feeling light.


Maggie drifted off to sleep watching tiny papers of ash float up the chimney from the fire. The next thing she saw was the letter she had written her father, floating on a tropical breeze. She scrambled to retrieve it, but her hands were bound again. Finally she managed to grab it and open it. Instead of telling her father not to worry, that she’d be back in a matter of weeks, the note simply read, “Dear Dad, I’m dead.” Then she looked out the nose of the plane just as it started to skim the treetops. On impact of the crash, she bolted upright in a cold sweat. The fire of the wreckage blurred back into the fire in the hearth. The rumble of the thunder that had awakened her was dying down outside.
God, what a nightmare! Maggie put her hands to her face. She’d dreamed that she’d taken off in a huff to some remote, third-world hell hole, cut off from civilization. With a trembling sigh, she lowered her hands and looked around her. What she saw was not her Denver apartment, and not her bedroom in her parents’ home, but an almost primitive little house.
Oh God.
She kept trying to wake herself up and finally admitted that she was awake. She blinked a couple times, hard, but the scenery did not change. This, she realized, was no dream.
She swung her feet to the floor and started to rock almost hysterically. Her first impulse was to comfort herself with some food. But there was no freezer here, which meant no Dove bars, and no refrigerator meant no cheesecake. In fact, the only food in the house was a few raw eggs, some flour and a blackened banana. Where, Maggie wondered, was a woman to find comfort?