#SaturdaySpotlight is on LK Simonds @SimondsLk & All In

Good Morning from Bandera, TX!

Yep, I drove up on Wednesday for a few days in my home away from home to visit with friends. Having fun but I forgot about this Cedar Fever crap and my sinuses are a mess LOL! 

Hope your New Year is starting out blessed.

Today's guest is new to me and our blog but I have a feeling we'll hear a lot from her in the future.

L. K. Simonds is a Fort Worth local. She has worked as a waitress, KFC hostess, telephone marketer, assembly-line worker, nanny, hospital lab technician, and air traffic controller. She's an instrument-rated pilot and an alumna of Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas. All In is her first novel, released from Morgan James Publishing in August 2019. 

A woman's empty pursuit of happiness leads to a crisis before finding redemption in the Lord in this challenging and gritty Christian novel.

Twenty-nine-year-old novelist and blackjack dealer Cami Taylor seems to have it all--but just underneath her confident exterior and newfound celebrity is a young woman in trouble. Cami's boyfriend, Joel, wants to get married, buy a house on Long Island, and raise a family--a life that's a million miles from Cami's idea of happiness. Her therapist suggests compromise and trust, but Cami would rather bolt like a deer.

Breaking things off with Joel, Cami launches herself on a new quest for happiness. But her pursuit of pleasure only takes her further from herself--and toward a harrowing new reality unlike anything she's faced before. What follows for Cami is a fight to the death that can only be waged with God's love.

Excerpt:

I wrote Double Down Blues while dealing blackjack at the River Bend Casino in Albuquerque. I told myself that I went to work in the casino to get the experience I needed to develop my protagonist, Jackie. To get firsthand experience of what a dealer’s life is like. Now I know I did it to escape the person I was in Phoenix—the mousy, dumpy bookworm I’d always been. My transformation began there, in Albuquerque. Vicariously at first, through the recklessness of my alter ego, Jackie. Then, as I emulated her, through my own recklessness.

A guy I met at a five-dollar table one night took me up in his airplane early the next morning. I remember it clearly, though it seems like a lifetime ago. How long has it been? Maybe four years now?

It was a still and frosty high-desert morning in November. The airplane was parked under a tiny shed out in a field. He pulled the ancient yellow contraption out into the morning sunlight, tied the tail end of it to the shed, and pulled the propeller around and around to start the engine. It sputtered and caught and finally rumbled to life. We got in—me very bravely—and took off from that field.

We climbed out over the valley, alongside the Sandia ridgeline, our cross-shaped shadow gliding across the craggy, cactus-strewn mountainside. As we sailed between the prickly ground and the infinite blue sky, every ordinary thing was transmuted to glorious.

I still remember how I felt, sitting behind him in that narrow, frail contrivance of wood and canvas. Midway Publishing had just accepted my manuscript, and I was drunk on the thrill of it. The freedom of leaving the earth behind, of going wherever we wished under our own power, was a perfect metaphor for my success. At that moment, anything seemed possible.

Then Eddie—his name was Eddie—shouted, “Hang on!” over the roar of the engine.

The plane suddenly heaved backward on its tail, nose skyward, and slowed until we seemed to hang motionless on the whirling propeller. All of the wind and engine sounds faded to silence.

“Autorotation!” Eddie barked.

As if on command, the body of the thing that held us in space shuddered with a death throe and rolled to one side like a breaching whale. The nose fell through the horizon and pointed straight down, toward the pale New Mexican dirt, and the entire machine began to whip around in a tight corkscrew. Fear snatched the breath from my throat, even though I knew it had to be a boyish prank meant to impress me. Then Eddie threw his hands over his head, and the airplane magically began to fly again.

I did not speak to him after that. Ever.

“All I had to do was let go of the controls and it’d fly right out of it,” he said.

As if that made any difference.

“Autorotation,” I say aloud to the empty apartment.

I now feel that same panic, the whipping, uncontrolled downward spiral. In the windshield the ground spins closer and closer. The eerie silence. If I take my hands from the controls, will everything return to normal as it did on that day? Will my life know how to right itself as that little airplane did?

All In can be purchased at Amazon. Watch the book trailer HERE and check out this Bookmates4inmates Story video.

Connect with LK at the following places....

Website: http://lksimonds.com/

Leaves of Grace Essays: http://melissakaysimonds.com/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18671721.L_K_Simonds

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisaksimonds/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/simondslk

I read and enjoyed All In and if you like gritty, realistic Christian fiction you will to!

Hope you enjoyed today's post and that you'll check back weekly for Wednesday Words with Friends and Saturday Spotlight. Don't forget to leave a comment and enter to win my monthly gift-card giveaway!

Until next time, take care and God Bless.

PamT