Excerpt:

"Another fine day, Katie," Bridget pronounced quietly stepping onto the porch with her own cup of tea.

"Uh huh," Cathleen replied without taking her eyes from the quickening fireball at the end of the field. She shed her blanket in the warming air and stretched her cramped legs.

"When are you going to climb down off your high horse and tell me what's eating you to pieces?" Bridget sighed and drank deeply from her cup.

"What makes you think I'm being eaten to pieces?" Cathleen turned to her.

"I see it in your eyes, dearie. Just as I saw it in your grandmother's eyes when she was trying to decide whether to go or to stay here."

"I wish it was that easy." Cathleen sighed looking back toward the mist rising off the grass. "You know, I used to think everything was black or white. The choices you made were always between doing the right thing or the wrong thing. What happens when both your choices are wrong?" She looked over to her aunt.

Bridget knit her brow, looked deeply into her eyes, as if the answer lay somewhere behind them. "At some point we're all faced with the same question, aren't we? What are we to do when everywhere leads somewhere we don't want to go? Look what your grandmother was faced with, staying with the man she loved, staying with her child and wrecking countless lives or returning to The Hollow and lying with another man."

"So why did she choose to lie with another man?" Cathleen asked.

"To answer that would be to know your Grandmother's soul, Katie. Over the years, I've learned that you can tell if someone's spirit is pure, truly shaman if what they do comes from the same place, from the same fundamental principle held within one's heart. To the spirit, the answer is always clear."

Cathleen sighed, returning to the rising sun for solace.

"Stop thinking about it, Cathleen. Give your heart a chance to answer." Bridget heaved herself out of the chair and moved toward the screen door. "I'll get breakfast started."

To buy the EBOOK: Use this shopping cart

To buy the PRINT BOOK:
1> Select and copy 1-58749-019-6
2> Click to go to Amazon.com
3> Paste the number into the Search Field

Author BIO: Cathy McCarthy was born May 24, 1952 in Ottawa Ontario, Canada. She spent much of her formative childhood on a farm in the Gatineau Hills, just north of Ottawa with her grandmother and two elderly aunts. Here she gained a spirituality and an appreciation for all that surrounded her that translates into all her writing. She currently resides just outside Washington DC with her husband Jim and daughter Emma.

From the time she was first able to put ideas to paper, Cathy has pursued her muse in writing works of fiction and non-fiction alongside the more practical aspects of keeping body and soul. After thirteen years of a professional career in systems librarianship, and two more as an ISP provider, she heeded her primary calling and retired to pursue a writing career. Except for necessary diversions into the working world, Cathy considers herself first and foremost a storyteller and a keeper of legends.

Cathy holds a four-year Bachelor of Arts in History from Ottawa University and a Masters in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also pursued studies in Film Art and Propaganda, Creative Writing, Native American History and Shamanism, Celtic Shamanism and Public Administration during her lifetime.

While The Hollow represents her first commercial publication of fiction, Cathy is published in peer-reviewed journals associated with her profession and has been privately published throughout the Canadian Federal Government. Along with The Hollow, Cathy has completed one other unpublished work of fiction Dissent in Real Time, a story of computer espionage and government control. She is also two-thirds finished with her third manuscript, The Voyage, a story of human will and love in the face of overwhelming physical disability.