All the Wrong Places

"I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the second of four children. Growing up with the influence of a long line of teachers with a passion for classical education, my time was filled with lessons in violin, cello, piano, ballet…and not-so-classical Girl Scouts and softball.

At the age of twelve, I traveled throughout Europe with my Grandmother and aunts, who filled my days with the shared reading of classics such as Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes, developing my love of literature early on.

I pursued my love of literature into college, earning a Bachelor's of English, a Master's of Education, and I am currently working to complete a Master's in English.

My first novel, All the Wrong Places, started as a short story for a creative writing course and chronicles many of my experiences living in a mortuary, raising my daughter on my own and discovering my Christian faith.

My years in college writing programs have left me with a varied collection of short stories, plays and poetry covering many personal experiences from teenage rebellion to single-motherhood and spiritual awakening.

While writing and continuing my own education, I taught High School English in an attempt to pass my love of literature and writing on to others, and continue to share that passion with students and other aspiring writers.

I currently spend my days pursuing my creative dreams and reaching out to women to share my experience, strength and hope as a survivor of sexual assault and domestic abuse. 

I reside in Eagle, Idaho with my husband,  and my very large cat. "

 ~ Website ~

Driving aimlessly through the stormy suburbs of San Francisco, Casey Wheeler is fleeing from her abusive and unfaithful husband with her five year old daughter Maddy asleep in the backseat. With nowhere to go and no one to turn to, Casey loses control of her emotions and her car, crashing into a hillside below a mortuary. 

Desperately seeking shelter, and more so independence, she finds herself taken in by the mortuary director who apprehensively offers her a job and a place to live. As she stumbles through the ins and outs of her new and morbid surroundings, Casey is forced into a hostile custody battle with her relentless and increasingly violent husband. 

In the midst of all the chaos, she finds a new family and even love in the eccentric and protective people of Golden Oaks Funeral Home. But just when she has found all she could hope for, she will have to fight to the death to protect it.

This semi-autobiographical story of a single-mother and her journey to self-discovery, independence and a true understanding of love will keep readers captivated and yearning for more.

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Snippet:

In life I had suffered a thousand deaths, and in the midst of death I encountered true life. I had looked in all the wrong places, until there, on a hill of ivy, I was found.

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Charlie's Choice

My name is Robyn Echols. Zina Abbott is the pen I use for my historical novels. I’m a member of Women Writing the West and Western Writers of America. I currently live with my husband in California’s central valley near the “Gateway to Yosemite.”

I love to read, quilt, work with digital images on my photo editing program, and work on my own family history.

I am a blogger. In addition to my own blog, I blog for several group blogs including the Sweet Americana Sweethearts blog, which I started and administer.

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Prequel to the Atwell Kin series:

Charlie, it would be easier to stop the flow of the great Missouri and Kansas Rivers than to prevent the Americans from coming to Kansas. 

It is 1856, and the United States opened Kansas Territory to American settlement two years before. Land belonging to the once-powerful Kansa tribe, known to the whites as the Kaw, was sold by treaty to the Americans a generation earlier.

His Kansa mother died from smallpox while Charlie was young. He lives with his American father who owns a trading post in Bonner Springs near the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. A child of two nations, Charlie learns through harsh experience he is not always accepted, including by the father of the pretty redhead who has caught his eye. The arrival of thousands of white settlers makes matters worse.

Frustrated, Charlie visits his Kansa uncle to learn the tribal ways, travel the Kaw Trail to their buffalo hunting grounds, and become a warrior with a warrior’s name. Once he knows both worlds, he will decide which will best serve him in the future.

Meadowlark’s traditional father wishes her to marry Broken Wing, a highly-respected full-blood Kansa warrior close to his own age. Meadowlark rejects being the junior wife under a dying oldest wife and a wolverine of a second wife. Once she learns her childhood friend who left the tribe years earlier has returned to the Kansa, she seeks him out. Even if he does consider her for a wife, can she persuade her father to allow him enough time to prove himself as a warrior? Will her father accept him for her husband in spite of his mixed ancestry?

Will Charlie decide on a future with the white Americans, or will he fight the coming of the Americans by clinging to the past with the Kansa? Will he try to straddle both worlds? What will Charlie choose?

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Snippet:

By this point, Meadowlark had guessed of whom they spoke. She fought down the surge of excitement that rose within her and spoke in a disinterested tone. “Who has come?

            The trio of women turned to face her. A wide smile split the face of Chases Quail.

            Her eyes full of merriment, Chases Quail answered for the group. “We speak of your childhood friend, Gray Squirrel. You do recall him, do you not, Sings-like-meadowlark? He has come for an extended visit with his uncle. Even now, he spends time with his cousin, Eyes-like-hawk, increasing his skills so he is better prepared for the buffalo hunt.”

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Foreign Relation

Didi Lawson exchanged her town car for a pick-up truck and learned to operate a tractor when she and her husband moved from Arizona to a farm in  Missouri where she now weaves her tales. Her love for writing started early in  life when  she entertained her friends with her stories, won prizes for he essays in high school and wrote road shows and poems for the youth group in her church. She enjoys the outdoors, her children and ten grandchildren, and keeps an active social calendar.

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It was supposed to be simple traveling to Germany to find her roots. But nothing turns out the way Tracy had planned. 

She meets a man who professes to be her half-brother and is less than happy with her visit. The villagers treat her with contempt for her father's presumed infamous past. 

Trying to solve the mystery, she uncovers secrets that had been hidden for over two decades. Wanting to clear her father's name, she realizes that by doing so she will ruin her chances of a happy life with the man who had captured her heart.

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Snippet:

 He brushed his thumb along her jaw line in a slow, tantalizing motion before he traced little circles and triangles along the way, barely touching her skin, het arousing every fiber of her being to peak awareness. She closed her eyes and concentrated on his gentle touch, even responding by rubbing her cheek against his hand.

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The Salem Grey Series

Raymond Hegsted was Born in Juneau, Alaska and raised by a truck driving Dad. Joined the Army on voluntary draft and served with 4^th infantry Regimental Intelligence and Reconnaissance reaching the rank of corporal.

He spent time living and working in Italy where he also got the chance to travel to many other European countries. After returning to America he helped develop a computerized scheduling system for the Oklahoma Scheduling Department.

After ten years of marriage ended in divorce he was sent to Ohio to head up corporate scheduling. Here he married second wife, Dr. Glena Louise Hegstad (A Montessori teacher). He then took early retirement, started and managed 5 different Montessori Daycare Schools (three of them in Flagstaff, Arizona under the name of The GlenMar Corporation).

Raymond wrote his first book at the age of sixty-one.  His wife got her Doctorate in education and he wrote books. He love writing! One of the reasons he decided to write was "I got tired of seeing ever one else on TV; I was vicariously living their life and not my own. Everyone had a story...share yours." He and his wife and have enjoyed many years with their four+one children…one child adopted them. They have been happily married for many years.

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Obsessed with finding a serial killer whom he has chased for years, Salem Grey has moved to a small town in Littleton, Washington. 

Operating as a police chief and from his compound home, he is finally closing in. With the help of his lady forensic M.E., A dangerous and shocking reality is being unveiled. 

~ Amazon Book 1 ~ 

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 Dr. Riva Parker Grey, Md and Chief of Police Salem Grey go to Las Vegas where Riva is to be the Keynote Speaker at a forensic conference. They meet old friends, but quickly get drawn into a strange series of murders. 

As the bodies begin piling up the twists and turns fueled by lies, deceit and unruly children make the investigators feel as though they keep making unneeded or wrong turns in a giant maze.

~ Amazon Book 2 ~

~ Goodreads ~ 

When mass graves are discovered in a glacier and also in the south-west desert of California, Salem Grey is called in to track down the killer or killers.

One of the victims is a woman whom Salem had once dated. Back at home trouble ignite when jewel hunters arrive in Littleton, Washington. Salem's half brother and his new bride become deeply involved. Faithful dogs, Otto, Fritz and Sarg stand ever ready to protect their friends.

~ Amazon Book 3 ~

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Top Ten List (or 11 because it's more fun):

1.     Being with my wife. I am not a jokster, but my humor is more like Hugh Grant int Notting Hill. I enjoy being with people who enjoy life in a clean and fun way.

2.     Good steaks

3.     Good music

4.     Reading feel good materials (Bible, Harry Potter)

5.     Family

6.     Learning

7.     Teaching

8.     Martial arts

9.     Dogs

10.Writing books and articles

11.Solving problems

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Queen Mary's Daughter

An avid gardener, artist, musician and writer, Emily-Jane Hills Orford has fond memories and lots of stories that evolved from a childhood growing up in a haunted Victorian mansion. Told she had a ‘vivid imagination’, the author used this talent to create stories in her head to pass tedious hours while sick, waiting in a doctor’s office, listening to a teacher drone on about something she already knew, or enduring the long, stuffy family car rides. The author lived her stories in her head, allowing her imagination to lead her into a different world, one of her own making. 

As the author grew up, these stories, imaginings and fantasies took to the written form and, over the years, she developed a reputation for telling a good story. Emily-Jane can now boast that she is an award-winning author of several books, including Mrs. Murray’s Ghost (Telltale Publishing 2018), Queen Mary’s Daughter (Clean Reads 2018), Gerlinda (CFA 2016) which received an Honorable Mention in the 2016 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards, To Be a Duke (CFA 2014) which was named Finalist and Silver Medalist in the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and received an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards and several other books. A retired teacher of music and creative writing, she writes about the extra-ordinary in life and the fantasies of dreams combined with memories. 

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There are so many possibilities that affect the course of history. One change, one small item overlooked, can make a world of difference, not only in a person's life, but in the history and well-being of an entire nation. And then there are those multiple scenarios of what if? What if King James VI of Scotland didn't succeed in amalgamating Scotland with England? Would Scotland have remained free and independent and a nation of its own well into the twenty-first century? And would Scotland, this independent version, make its own decision to join the European Union when its southern neighbor was choosing to pull away? And, what if there was another heir to the Scottish throne?

In Queen Mary's Daughter (Clean Reads Publisher), author Emily-Jane Hills Orford presents another plausible timeline, one that incorporates both historical fact and fiction with the endless possibilities of time travel. 

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Snippet:

As the wind picked up, blowing her deep red, unruly curls helter-skelter over her face, Mary Elizabeth’s eyes focused on her hands. She stretched out the left hand, revealing the old ring that sat on her baby finger. It was a tiny ring and it only fit on the one finger. At the same time Gran bestowed the heirloom gift on her granddaughter, she had shared her story of the ring, at least as much as she was willing to share. The ring had been in the family for generations and only the firstborn daughter of the firstborn daughter (and so on and so on) could wear it. The ring was her connection to a past she wasn’t sure she believed in, a past that had been shared from one generation to the next. Or was there more? Was there a story her grandmother never managed to share?

What would she find at Loch Leven Castle? The clues had to be there. But the boy said it was mostly ruins, crumbled walls and tumbled stones, except for the tower. Queen Mary’s tower. What could she possibly unearth to collaborate Gran’s story? And she only had two weeks to do it. She couldn’t afford more time away from work. Even though it was a poorly paid entry level job, she didn’t want to risk losing it.

A glow emanated from the ring on her outstretched hand. She felt a warmth spread up her arms. The wind picked up, violently tossing her hair in every direction, swishing her coat ends like laundry hanging loosely on a clothesline. She faced into the wind, allowing its vicious impact to draw her forward. She took a step, then another, until she felt the cold wet of the lapping waves of the loch splash over her feet. The water was cold; it jolted her back to reality. What was she doing walking into the loch? What was the strong pulse pulling her forward? She allowed her eyes to glance out across the loch, now almost obliterated by the darkened storm that raged all around her.

“Miss.” She heard a voice from behind her as the power continued to drag her into the loch. “Miss!” A hand gripped her arm, yanking her back toward the dry shore. “Miss!” The hands tightened their hold as she tried to pull away, tried to return to the loch. A scream pierced the air. She didn’t know where the scream originated. It sounded like it came from across the water.

It also sounded like it came from deep within herself.

Another scream and everything went black.

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