The Girl in the Mirror has taken me much longer to finish than any of the other "Girl" books. Probably because Krystal is such a beloved character, and who she is, is much more complex than how it reads(well, for people unfamiliar with my girls) and what happens to her unexpected, even for me.

In many ways, this story is a sharp departure from how I usually tell the story for one of my girls. I want to do it justice, and yet, it's seems almost an insurmountable task. Readers at times see things that trigger insta-reaction. Ah, I hate this plot device. Oh I hate this. Not again.... but, everything in a novel has been done before. The only unique thing a writer can do is the way she writes it and the meaning it's attached to. I don't know if I do that well. I don't know if I've done it well with Krystal, but it is my hope readers will look beyond each individual scene and realize it's part of a puzzle that tells a story of a very unique girl. As with all my books it's grounded in simple truths about love and family and life. I find interesting that my most sunny character, sweet little Krystal, should be the one encased in the pages of my darkest book.

As ever, I wish you peace...and I hope enjoy this Chapter One Sneak Peek...Yep, we're counting down to release day:

Copyright © 2016 Susan Ward
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 1523229047
ISBN-13: 978-1523229048
“The game we all play is the same. It’s a simple war we fight every day: what we allow ourselves to see and remember.
 
How we balance our scale.
 
More good or more bad.
 
The things we give importance to and the things we let be. In truth, all our scales, regardless of what we’ve done with our lives, are equal. They are equal at our birth and equal at our death, and not a single act between the two changes any of it. We live, we die, we love, and we lose. And everything else doesn’t matter. In the giant scheme of things no person is greater than any other, and our only purpose is to love and if we miss that we are nothing.” ~Jackson Parker

Chapter One
 
White wall, white wall, glass wall, white wall, and ceiling. That’s my world now, but inside my head I dance. Five, six, seven, eight. Arm high, shoulder down, extend through the leg, toe pointed--

Searing hot pain blasts upward from my ankle like a flash fire across my flesh. Fuck, I pointed my toe in the real world and not my head.

“Krystal, stay still.” I hear a voice—beloved, but not the one I want. “Don’t move, sunshine. You’re in the hospital. Remember? Your leg is in traction. The doctor said it’s healing well, but don’t try to move. You have to stay still to get better.”

My lids lift, which is a mistake because I don’t want to see this.

Reality—not the one I want. No stage. No audience. No elegant movement of my body before an enthralled crowd. Black eyes stare at me, heart-wrenching with worry, instead of hazel eyes lush with love watching from the wings…hazel eyes.
I slowly move my gaze around the room.

White wall.
White wall.
Glass wall.
White wall.
My father hovering beside the bed.
My logic rebels.

This image can’t be real. This isn’t how I remember my dad, not at any time since my birth. Alan looks old, frazzled and discomposed in a way that makes him strange and alarming and unfamiliar. No, that’s not my father. It can’t be. It hurts too much to see in his eyes and on his face the truth of me. Knowing I’m the cause of him looking that way.

No, this is not reality. This is the nightmare. I, Krystal Harris, do not exist here anymore. I’m only real inside my head so long as I never let myself be here.

Five, six, seven, eight…

“They brought your dinner,” Alan says, moving to retrieve a tray from the table. “You should try to eat, baby girl. It’s what will get you well. You need to start eating so you’ll be strong enough to begin physical therapy next week. And hopefully, soon after, home where you belong.”

I belong?
I close my eyes.

I can’t ever go home again. It would kill me. It’s why I don’t speak. Why I count the walls. Why I don’t eat. I can’t go home knowing you know…

I feel something touch my lip and look up to find my dad holding a spoon and waiting patiently for me to take a bite of that institutional-grade chocolate pudding.

I can’t eat. Not that. I tighten my lips against the spoon.

My dad’s eyes liquefy. “I know it’s not very good, Krystal, but you have to eat what they bring you. Later, you can have what you want. But for now you’ve got to eat every bite of this.”

I look away. Where’s Jacob? I haven’t seen hazel eyes since I got here. I’m pretty sure he was here when I was first brought it. Why haven’t I seen him since? How could he leave me?

I anxiously search the room again, halting to stare at the closed door.

I hear the spoon being set down and my dad pushes the bed table back so he can sit beside me. “There’s no need to worry, Krystal. No one is ever going to harm you again. Graham Carson is right outside the door. Dillon’s at the end of the hallway, and Brayden’s in the lobby. No one is ever going to hurt you again.”

Graham Carson? Dillon? Brayden?

Why isn’t Jacob here?
He’s my bodyguard—everything inside me starts to twirl—and he’s more, so much more…

The pain suffusing my heart compels me to speak. I need to know what’s happened to Jacob. I struggle to push out the words. “Where…is—”

“Oh, thank God.” My father’s low, raspy voice gushes over my breathy, near-soundless utterance. His eyes go wide since I haven’t managed to speak before now. His gentle, roughly callused hands close over mine. “Your mother is just down the hall in the waiting room. They only let one of us sit with you at a time. Everyone is here, sweetheart. Your brothers and sisters. Madison. Jack and Linda. The entire family. We’ve all been here, every minute since Graham brought you home to us.”

Graham brought me home?
No, no, no.
Jacob brought me here, Daddy.
Jacob saved me, not Graham.
How could my dad get that wrong?
Terrifying images flash in my head of things I don’t want to remember.
Juarez.
The flight home.
Blood. The panic in the plane. It wasn’t because of me. The blood was Jacob’s. Not mine.

“Do you want me to get your mother?”

I shake my head.

“Can you try to eat?”

I shake my head.

My dad’s features alter with fear. “You’re going to be all right, Krystal. But you have to help us. You have to eat, baby. You can’t come home until you are strong enough for the doctors to release you.”

He grabs the spoon and holds it before me again.

I shake my head.
I don’t want food.
I stare at the door.

If my leg wasn’t trapped in that harness I’d run from the room.

I want to be back in what I never expected to find when I first left Pacific Palisades.

I want hazel eyes and loving smiles, strong arms holding me, nights of tenderness and passion, laughter and Manhattan again.

Is Jacob dead?
Is that what they’re not telling me?
No, no, no.

Shutting out the heart-ripping truth surrounding me, I escape back into my own thoughts where life is how I want it to be. Where I can dance in my dreams with Jacob again.[Copyright © 2016 Susan Ward. All Rights Reserved.]

Yep, if you can do math, that's right This book is coming in at  a nice 110K words. The Girl in the Mirror has been a challenge to write, and a challenge to get through editing. I always have my books blocked out in my head before I sit down to write, but sometimes the writing process isn't what I anticipate. It's definitely not with this book.

I think if I had it to do over again, Krystal would be her own series. I can see 3 books total out of this story. But I included her in Sand & Fog Series, and that series is all standalone books, so now I'm trying to work her story into something powerful and coherent in a single book. Not an easy task. It's so much more complex now that I'm trying to finalize it on paper.

I've done something new with this book, and I'm curious what my readers will think. It's divided into parts--part one, part two, part three--the way I would write  a continuing book series, but obviously not the length of 3 individual books. I've also done dual POV. Jacob Merrick is such a sweet character I found myself wanting to spend some time in his head space. I haven't done that before in a book(dual POV). But it's important you understand him from the get go, to understand what happens to Krystal and how their story ends. Or even to understand the point of this book. Jacob holds 50% of the message.

I'm like that girl who leaves a trail of breadcrumbs through her books for her readers to follow and I often wonder if my readers see the crumbs. There's all kinds of  weaving between the parts of this book, and the story is told in three parts, but like in a mirror, inverted with different meaning.  Part two is the mirror image of part one, and part three is the result of Krystal and Jacob having gone through those two phases of their lives, and as ever, it holds my little truism about love and life and the overall message I want to say in this book.

Anyway, as I work to get the last of it through editing so I can release, I wonder if anyone will like this book and if the story will make sense to anyone but me. I've done something rather brutal to my darling Krystal, but I couldn't have done it if I hadn't known Jacob was on the pages with her to protect her for me. Least you think I'm a mean author, I leave you with a new Jackson Parker quote from inside the pages of The Girl in the Mirror: "With great loss can follow great happiness if you love." Yep, like always Jack is the voice of reason in my new book.

As ever, I wish you peace.

And yes, I'm at Disneyland. Well, technically not in the park. In one of the resort hotels with my feet up and the air conditioning cranked up. We've been traveling with some of our girls, having a mini-cation. First days at the beach in Santa Barbara and now days of madness as a Disney Resort and then back to the beach a day to recover before the girls take off into their lives again leaving Mom exactly where I am now. Alone in a room writing something.

Last night was my wedding anniversary, and if you know my husband, it's surprising he was a trooper and willing to have it at Disney. He was raised in the OC. The house he grew up in not far from here, but he hasn't been a fan of the theme park since oh, maybe, early twenties. Last time he went inside was 1990.  Ah, but we compromise in marriage, so anniversary at Disney, kids in the park with my grandson and me in the hotel waiting for my husband to return from his "rummy"(that's what I call his old friends from college) lunch.  The first college he graduate Fullerton Community College. Never let anyone tell you, you can't build a future starting in community college. My husband had an amazing career and there is no Ivy League seal on any of his degrees.

This morning we took a long walk on Main Street Disney outside the park, just watching families, then having breakfast burritos on a restaurant outdoor patio. And I'll confess now, Bloody Marys, too, at 7a.m. but heck we're on vacation right. 

I see myself as those younger women racing toward the park trying to keep up with their children. But that's not who I am any more. I came face to face with that when I bumped into our kids going into the part as we were leaving the Main Street area. For a second I looked at my daughter Tracy, and went, oh damn, that's her not me, not a mirror but my girl all grown up, before she raced off after baby hugs before he disappeared into trouble.

The experience of this week has left me overly emotional and overly introspective. Somewhere along the way I stopped being who I see in my head and I got...more mature...slightly seasoned...OK, hell I got old.  This week has made me think of the prologue in The Girl in the Comfortable Quiet.  I  am the girl in the comfortable quiet these days. The one who sits back and watches as life happens around her. 

Copyright © 2015 Susan Ward
EPILOGUE
CHRISSIE’S JOURNAL
The older I get the less I feel a part of my own story. I don’t think that is unique or strange for a woman in her forties. I hear it all the time from my girlfriends, how they slowly disappear and get lost in their marriages, their children or their careers. I don’t know if that is what’s happened to me. I don’t like to overly analyze it. I am quieter now and I savor the quiet in me.

I watch more sunrises and I stir the pot less. I’ve learned that things happen around me, because of me, and to me, and there is not much you can do or really have any true understanding of which kind of event each is. I breath, I watch the sunrise, I love, and I cherish my tokens and my tears, kissing them both thankfully for they both are a part of me, bringing me here to where it is comfortable to be less a part of my own story.

As badly as I have done many parts of my life, it was never because I didn’t love. The old cookie tin in the closet holds both my love and my regrets.

I pull out my tokens and tears one by one and I stare at them, these pieces of meaningless nothing to others that are markers of the milestones of me.

It is good, very, very good that none of us can truly see the future. It is good for all of us that the future, no matter what we see, is really black. I could not see the future, a heartbreaking and frightening thing, at eighteen. I can’t see it at forty-two, now a comfortable and quiet thing.

I listen to my family return to the house, bags being dropped, children running the halls looking for me. This is my life, the core, the everything that is me. It is a perfect place for me to step back, enjoy living, and be less part of my own story.

It is peaceful to be in that place where the most significant parts of your life are not the parts you actively live on your own. They are the parts shared with you, the part of others you try to mend, the moments you are no part of and yet the catalyst for them to have been.

I sit back in the quiet and I let life, even my own, happen around me, where it is comfortable...
Copyright © 2015 Susan Ward

And as I finish my next "Girl" book,  The Girl in the Mirror, I sit in the quiet and watch my own girls and my life happening around me.

As ever I wish you Peace.